Starting from a Whitney decomposition of a symmetric cone $\Omega$, analogous to the dyadic partition $[2^j, 2^{ j + 1})$ of the positive real line, in this paper we develop an adapted Littlewood–Paley theory for functions with spectrum in $\Omega$. In particular, we define a natural class of Besov spaces of such functions, $B^{p, q}_\nu$, where the role of the usual derivation is now played by the generalized wave operator of the cone $\Delta(\frac{\partial}{\partial x})$. We show that $B^{p, q}_\nu$ consists precisely of the distributional boundary values of holomorphic functions in the Bergman space $A^{p, q}_\nu (T_\Omega)$, at least in a 'good range' of indices $1 \leq q < q_{\nu, p}$. We obtain the sharp $q_{\nu, p}$ when $p \leq 2$, and conjecture a critical index for $p > 2$. Moreover, we show the equivalence of this problem with the boundedness of Bergman projectors $P_\nu \colon L^{p, q}_\nu \to A^{p, q}_\nu$, for which our result implies a positive answer when $q_{\nu, p}' < q < q_{\nu, p}$. This extends, to general cones, previous work of the authors on the light-cone.

Finally, we focus on light-cones and introduce new necessary and sufficient conditions for our conjecture to hold in terms of inequalities related to the cone multiplier problem. In particular, using recent work by Laba and Wolff, we establish the validity of our conjecture for light-cones when $p$ is sufficiently large.