Nonlinear Hardy-Stein type identities for harmonic functions relative to symmetric integro-differential operators

Abstract

We show identities of Hardy-Stein type for harmonic functions relative to integro-differential operators corresponding to general symmetric regular Dirichlet forms satisfying the absolute continuity condition. The novelty is that we consider operators of mixed type containing both local and nonlocal component. Moreover, the identities are proved for compositions of harmonic functions and general convex functions. We also provide some conditional identities, i.e. identities for ratios of harmonic functions. As an application we give a characterization of norms in harmonic Hardy spaces and prove Littlewood--Paley type estimates for square functions. To illustrate general results, we discuss in some details the case of divergence form operator and purely nonlocal operator defined by some jump kernel. Our proofs are rather short and use mainly probabilistic methods.