1. Introduction
The Wolff potential of a nonnegative function $f \in L_{loc}^1(\mathbb {R}^n)$ is defined as in [Reference Hedberg and Wolff10] by
where $1<\gamma <\infty $ , $\beta>0$ , $\beta \gamma <n$ and $B_t(x)$ is a ball of radius t centred at x. It is not difficult to see that $W_{1,2}(f)$ is the Newton potential and $W_{{\alpha }/{2},2}(f)$ is the Reisz potential.
The Wolff potentials are helpful for understanding nonlinear partial differential equations (see [Reference Kilpelaiinen and Maly15, Reference Labutin16, Reference Phuc and Verbitsky23]). For example, if $\mu $ is a positive Borel measure, $W_{1,\gamma }(\mu )$ can be used to estimate positive solutions of the $\gamma $ -Laplace equation
If $\inf _{R^n}u=0$ , then there exist positive constants $C_1$ and $C_2$ such that (see [Reference Kilpelaiinen and Maly15, Reference Phuc and Verbitsky23])
Set $R(x)=u(x)[W_{1,\gamma }(\mu )(x)]^{-1}$ . Then u solves the integral equation
with $\beta =1$ , where $R(x)$ is a double-bounded function (in view of (1.2)). When ${\mu =u^q}$ , the qualitative properties of positive solutions of (1.3) are well studied. Existence results can be seen in [Reference Lei and Li17] and the radial symmetry of positive solutions can be seen in [Reference Chen and Li4, Reference Liu21]. See also [Reference Ma, Chen and Li22] for the integrability of finite energy solutions and [Reference Sun and Lei25] for the asymptotic behaviour of those solutions at infinity which shows that the decay rate of those positive solutions of (1.1) with $\mu =u^q$ is the same as the fast decay rate in [Reference Franca8, Reference Kawano, Yanagida and Yotsutani14].
Equation (1.3) with $R(x) \equiv 1$ and $\mu \!=\!u^q$ is a generalisation of the Hardy–Littlewood– Sobolev integral equation. Namely, when $\gamma =2$ and $\beta =\alpha /2$ , (1.3) reduces to
This equation is associated with the extremal functions of the Hardy–Littlewood– Sobolev inequality (see [Reference Lieb20]):
where $\min \{s,r\}>1$ , ${1}/{r}+{1}/{s}={(n+\alpha )}/{n}$ , $f \in L^r(\mathbb {R}^n)$ , $g \in L^s(\mathbb {R}^n)$ . Positive solutions of (1.4) and the corresponding partial differential equations of the Lane–Emden type are well studied. In particular, see [Reference Chen, Jin, Li and Lim2, Reference Jin and Li13] for the integrability of positive finite energy solutions of the corresponding system. Based on this result, [Reference Lei, Li and Ma18] gives the asymptotic behaviour of those positive solutions.
In 2015, Huang et al. [Reference Huang, Li and Yin12] used (1.5) to prove a discrete Hardy–Littlewood–Sobolev inequality and deduce the Euler–Lagrange system satisfied by the extremal sequences. When $f \equiv g$ , such a system can be seen as the discrete form of (1.4). Chen and Zheng [Reference Chen and Zheng6] obtained the summability of some positive solutions and their asymptotic behaviour is obtained in [Reference Lei, Li and Tang19].
The discrete Wolff potential is used to study some nonlinear problems in [Reference Cascante, Ortega and Verbitsky1, Reference Hedberg and Wolff10, Reference Phuc and Verbitsky23]. Let $f=f(i)$ , $i \in \mathbb {Z}^n$ , be a nonnegative sequence. Define a discrete form of the Wolff potential by
The discrete form of (1.3) is
where
Here, $C>1$ is an absolute constant and such an $R(i)$ is called a double-bounded sequence. This equation appears in the study of crystal physics, neural networks and other nonlinear problems (see [Reference Li7, Reference Gassner, Probst, Lauenstein and Hermansson9, Reference Hua and Li11]). We investigate the summability and the asymptotic behaviour of positive solutions of (1.6). We use a regularity lifting lemma (Lemma 2.2) to obtain an initial summability interval of positive solutions. We then extend the interval to an optimal one by means of a Wolff-type inequality (Lemma 2.1).
We now state the main results in this paper. Write
Theorem 1.1. Assume $w \in l^{s_0}(\mathbb {Z}^n)$ solves (1.6) with (1.7). If
we have the following summability and asymptotic behaviour results:
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(i) w belongs to $l^s(\mathbb {Z}^n)$ for any $s \in ({n(\gamma -1)}/{(n-\beta \gamma )},\infty ]$ and the left end point ${n(\gamma -1)}/{(n-\beta \gamma )}$ is optimal;
-
(ii) if $w(i)$ belongs to a radially symmetric and decreasing surface, then the sequence $w(i) |i|^{{(n-\beta \gamma )}/{(\gamma -1)}}$ is double-bounded.
Remark 1.2. Condition (1.8) in Theorem 1.1 is not essential. In fact, by a similar argument to that in [Reference Lei and Li17], (1.6) has no positive solution when $0<q \leq {n(\gamma -1)}/{(n-\beta \gamma )}$ . An analogous nonexistence result for another discrete Wolff-type equation can be seen in [Reference Phuc and Verbitsky23].
Remark 1.3. The assumption ‘the deceasing surface’ in Theorem 1.1(ii) is not essential. In fact, for bounded i, it is easy to see that $w(i) |i|^{{(n-\beta \gamma )}/{(\gamma -1)}}$ is double-bounded. Therefore, we only consider the case when $|i|$ is sufficiently large. By the ideas in Step 1 of the proof of [Reference Chen and Li4, Theorem 1], and by the same argument in [Reference Lei, Li and Tang19, Section 2.1], we also deduce that $w(i)$ is decreasing about some $i_0 \in \mathbb {Z}^n$ when $|i|$ is large.
Remark 1.4. When $\beta =\alpha /2$ , $\gamma =2$ , Theorem 1.1(i) and (ii) are consistent with the results in [Reference Chen and Zheng6, Reference Lei, Li and Tang19], respectively. The initial summability condition $w \in l^{s_0}(\mathbb {Z}^n)$ appears in [Reference Chen, Li and Ou5], but is different to the initial integrability condition in [Reference Ma, Chen and Li22, Reference Sun and Lei25]. In fact, $s_0$ can take all the values mentioned in these papers for the different critical exponents q which determine the existence of positive solutions (see [Reference Serrin and Zou24]).
2. Preliminaries
2.1. Wolff-type inequality
In 2008, Phuc and Verbitsky [Reference Phuc and Verbitsky23] gave the following relation between the Wolff potential and the Riesz potential. If $q>\gamma -1>0$ , there exists ${C>1}$ such that
Combining this with the Hardy–Littlewood–Sobolev inequality, one can obtain the Wolff-type inequality (see [Reference Ma, Chen and Li22, Corollary 2.1]):
For the discrete sequence $f(i)$ , we have the same kind of inequality.
Lemma 2.1. When $q>\gamma -1>0$ ,
Proof. Let $\epsilon \in (0, 1/3)$ be sufficiently small and in (2.1), take
We claim that
In fact, since $B_{\epsilon }(i) \cap B_{\epsilon }(j) =\emptyset $ for $i \neq j$ ,
This implies (2.3).
However, when $t>2\epsilon $ , we have $\bigcup _{|j-i|<t-2\epsilon }B_{\epsilon }(j) \subset B_{t-\epsilon }(i) \subset B_t(x)$ . Therefore,
Since $i,j \in \mathbb {Z}^n$ , when $\epsilon $ is sufficiently small, $|j-i| \geq 2\epsilon $ for $i \neq j,$ and when $t>2\epsilon $ ,
Therefore,
when $\epsilon $ is sufficiently small. Thus, from (2.4),
Inserting this result and (2.3) into (2.1), we obtain (2.2).
2.2. Regularity lifting lemma
Let V be a topological vector space. Suppose there are two extended norms, $\|\cdot \|_X, \|\cdot \|_Y :V \to [0,\infty ]$ , defined on V (that is, allowing that the norm of an element in V might be infinity). Let
Lemma 2.2 [Reference Chen and Li3, Theorem 3.3.1].
Let T be a contraction map from X into itself and from Y into itself. Assume that $f \in X$ and that there exists a function $g \in Z := X \cap Y$ such that $f = Tf + g$ in X. Then f also belongs to Z.
This regularity lifting lemma can be used to study integral equations involving the Riesz potentials and the Wolff potentials. It was used in [Reference Chen, Jin, Li and Lim2, Reference Chen, Li and Ou5, Reference Chen and Zheng6, Reference Jin and Li13, Reference Ma, Chen and Li22] to obtain better integrability results for positive solutions of Hardy–Littlewood–Sobolev-type equations, Stein–Weiss-type equations, discrete Stein–Weiss-type equations and Wolff-type equations.
3. Summability
Theorem 3.1. Assume $w \in l^{s_0}(\mathbb {Z}^n)$ solves (1.6) with (1.7) and (1.8). Then,
Proof. By [Reference Chen and Zheng6, Lemma 2.2] or [Reference Huang, Li and Yin12, Lemma 2.1], $w \in l^{s_0}(\mathbb {Z}^n)$ implies $w \in l^{\infty }(\mathbb {Z}^n)$ , and hence
From (1.8), it follows that $s_0 \geq {n((\gamma -1))}/{(n-\beta \gamma )}$ . We lift the summability from (3.2) to (3.1).
Step 1. Establish an operator equation. For $A>0$ , set
and $w_B(i)=w(i)-w_A(i)$ . Let $\sigma $ satisfy
For $g \in l^\sigma (\mathbb {Z}^n)$ , define operators T and S by
and write
Clearly, w is a solution of the operator equation $g=Tg+F$ .
Step 2. T is a contraction map from $l^\sigma (\mathbb {Z}^n)$ into itself. In fact, the Hölder inequality and (1.7) imply $|Tg| \leq Cw^{2-\gamma } |Sg|^{\gamma -1}$ . Using the Hölder inequality again yields
where $t>0$ satisfies
Hereafter, for simplicity, we denote $\|\cdot \|_{l^s(\mathbb {Z}^n)}$ by $\|\cdot \|_s$ .
Therefore, we can use Lemma 2.1 to obtain
Since (3.5) leads to
it follows from (3.7) and the Hölder inequality that $\|Sg\|_t^{\gamma -1} \leq C\|w_A\|_{s_0}^{q-1} \|g\|_\sigma $ . Inserting this into (3.4) yields
Since $w \in l^{s_0}(\mathbb {Z}^n)$ ,
when A is sufficiently large. Thus, T is a shrinking operator. Since T is linear, it follows that T is a contraction map from $l^{\sigma }(\mathbb {Z}^n)$ to itself as long as $\sigma $ satisfies (3.3).
Step 3. Estimating F to lift the regularity. Similar to the derivation of (3.4) and (3.7), for all $\sigma $ satisfying (3.3), we also deduce that
where t satisfies (3.6). Noting $w\in l^{s_0}(\mathbb {Z}^n)$ and the definition of $w_B$ , we have $F \in l^{\sigma }(\mathbb {Z}^n)$ as long as $\sigma $ satisfies (3.3). Taking $X=l^{s_0}(\mathbb {Z}^n)$ , $Y=l^{\sigma }(\mathbb {Z}^n)$ and $Z=l^{s_0}(\mathbb {Z}^n) \cap l^{\sigma }(\mathbb {Z}^n)$ in Lemma 2.2, yields $w \in l^{\sigma }(\mathbb {Z}^n)$ for all $\sigma $ satisfying (3.3).
Step 4. Extend the interval from (3.3) to that in (3.1). Let
Then we can use Lemma 2.1 to deduce that
Noting (3.3), from (3.9), we see that $\|w\|_s <\infty $ as long as s satisfies
Next, we will prove that (3.10) is true as long as (3.8) holds. We only need to verify
In fact,
Thus, (3.11) is true, and hence $w \in l^s(\mathbb {Z}^n)$ for all s satisfying (3.8). Combining this with (3.2), we see that (3.1) is true.
Step 5. If
we claim $w \not \in l^s(\mathbb {Z}^n)$ . In fact, when $|i|$ is suitably large,
Therefore, by (3.12), for suitably large $M>0$ ,
The claim is proved.
Steps 4 and 5 show that the integrability interval is the one in (3.1). The proof of Theorem 3.1 is complete.
4. Decay rates
Proposition 4.1. Assume $w \in l^{s_0}(\mathbb {Z}^n)$ solves (1.6) with (1.7) and (1.8). If $w(i)$ belongs to a radially symmetric and decreasing surface, we can find $C>1$ such that for large $|i|$ ,
Proof. Without loss of generality, we assume $w(i)$ is radially symmetric about $i_0$ . Write
Step 1. For any $s>{(n-\beta \gamma )}/{n(\gamma -1)}$ , we can find $C>0$ such that for large $R>0$ ,
In fact, from Theorem 3.1, $w \in l^s(\mathbb {Z}^n)$ when s belongs to the interval of (3.1). Thus, we can denote $\sum _{i \in \mathbb {Z}^n}w^s(i)$ by a constant $C_s$ . In view of the monotonicity of $\omega (R)$ , we deduce that
Thus, (4.1) is verified.
Step 2. There exists $c>0$ such that $w(i) \geq c|i|^{-{(n-\beta \gamma )}/{(\gamma -1)}}$ for large $|i|$ . In fact, if ${|j-i_0|<2}$ , then for large $|i|$ and $t \in (2|i|,4|i|)$ ,
This means $\{j : |j-i_0|<2\} \subset \{j : |j-i|<t\}$ . Therefore, by the monotonicity of $\omega (r)$ ,
when $t \in (2|i|,4|i|)$ . Thus,
Step 3. Estimate the upper bound of $w(i)$ for large $|i|$ . Clearly,
Claim 1. There exists $C>0$ such that $ I_1 \leq C|i|^{-{(n-\beta \gamma )}/{(\gamma -1)}} $ for large $|i|$ . In fact, we have ${|i|}/{2} \leq |j| \leq {3|i|}/{2}$ when $|j-i|<t$ and $t<{|i|}/{2}$ . By virtue of the monotonicity of $\omega (r)$ , for large $|i|$ ,
when $|j-i|<t$ and $t<{|i|}/{2}$ . Therefore, by (4.1),
We choose s approaching the left end point of the interval of (3.1) such that
Inserting this in (4.2) proves the claim.
Claim 2. There exists $C>0$ such that $ I_2 \leq C|i|^{-{(n-\beta \gamma )}/{(\gamma -1)}} $ for large $|i|$ . In fact, since $(\gamma -1)^{-1} \geq 1$ , Jensen’s inequality gives
Since $\sum _{|j| \leq 2|i_0|}w^q(j) \leq C$ ,
However, when $|j|> 2|i_0|$ , we have $|j-i_0| \geq |j|-|i_0|> {|j|}/{2}$ . Applying the monotonicity of $\omega (r)$ and (4.1),
By this result and (4.3),
Inserting this into $I_{22}$ yields
Claim 2 is proved and the proof of Proposition 4.1 is complete.
Acknowledgement
The authors thank the unknown referees very much for their helpful suggestions.