On the Semicontinuity of Functionals on Function Spaces

Abstract

Results on the upper and lower semicontinuity of functionals defined on spaces of convex and more general functions are established. In particular, the following result is obtained. Let $\phi(v; \cdot)$ be the density of the absolutely continuous part of a Radon measure $\Phi(v; \cdot)$ associated to a function $v\colon X\rightarrow \mathbb{R}$ defined on the topological measure space $(X,\lambda)$. For concave $\zeta\colon [0, \infty)\rightarrow[0,\infty)$ with $\lim_{t\to 0} \zeta(t)=0$ and $\lim_{t\to\infty}\zeta(t)/t= 0$, it is shown that the functional $v \mapsto \int_{X} \zeta(\phi(v;x))d\lambda(x)$ depends upper semicontinuously on $v$. Examples include functional affine surface areas for convex functions.