A note on properties of the restriction operator on Sobolev spaces

Abstract

In our companion paper (S.N. Chandler Wilde, D.P. Hewett, A. Moiola, Sobolev spaces on non-Lipschitz subsets of $\mathbb{R}^n$ with application to boundary integral equations on fractal screens, 2016) we studied a number of different Sobolev spaces on a general (non-Lipschitz) open subset $\Omega$ of $\mathbb{R}^n$, defined as closed subspaces of the classical Bessel potential spaces $H^s(\mathbb{R}^n)$ for $s\in\mathbb{R}$. These spaces are mapped by the restriction operator to certain spaces of distributions on $\Omega$. In this note we make some observations about the relation between these spaces of global and local distributions. In particular, we study conditions under which the restriction operator is or is not injective, surjective and isometric between given pairs of spaces. We also provide an explicit formula for minimal norm extension (an inverse of the restriction operator in appropriate spaces) in a special case.