247B, Notes 4: almost everywhere convergence of Fourier series

This set of notes discusses aspects of one of the oldest questions in Fourier analysis, namely the nature of convergence of Fourier series.

If is an absolutely integrable function, its Fourier coefficients are defined by the formula

If is smooth, then the Fourier coefficients are absolutely summable, and we have the Fourier inversion formula

where the series here is uniformly convergent. In particular, if we define the partial summation operators

then converges uniformly to when is smooth.

What if is not smooth, but merely lies in an class for some ? The Fourier coefficients remain well-defined, as do the partial summation operators . The question of convergence in norm is relatively easy to settle:

Exercise 1

• (i) If and , show that converges in norm to . (Hint: first use the boundedness of the Hilbert transform to show that is bounded in uniformly in .)
• (ii) If or , show that there exists such that the sequence is unbounded in (so in particular it certainly does not converge in norm to . (Hint: first show that is not bounded in uniformly in , then apply the uniform boundedness principle in the contrapositive.)

The question of pointwise almost everywhere convergence turned out to be a significantly harder problem:

Theorem 2 (Pointwise almost everywhere convergence)

• (i) (Kolmogorov, 1923) There exists such that is unbounded in for almost every .
• (ii) (Carleson, 1966; conjectured by Lusin, 1913) For every , converges to as for almost every .
• (iii) (Hunt, 1967) For every and , converges to as for almost every .

Note from Hölder’s inequality that contains for all , so Carleson’s theorem covers the case of Hunt’s theorem. We remark that the precise threshold near between Kolmogorov-type divergence results and Carleson-Hunt pointwise convergence results, in the category of Orlicz spaces, is still an active area of research; see this paper of Lie for further discussion.

Carleson’s theorem in particular was a surprisingly difficult result, lying just out of reach of classical methods (as we shall see later, the result is much easier if we smooth either the function or the summation method by a tiny bit). Nowadays we realise that the reason for this is that Carleson’s theorem essentially contains a frequency modulation symmetry in addition to the more familiar translation symmetry and dilation symmetry. This basically rules out the possibility of attacking Carleson’s theorem with tools such as Calderón-Zygmund theory or Littlewood-Paley theory, which respect the latter two symmetries but not the former. Instead, tools from “time-frequency analysis” that essentially respect all three symmetries should be employed. We will illustrate this by giving a relatively short proof of Carleson’s theorem due to Lacey and Thiele. (There are other proofs of Carleson’s theorem, including Carleson’s original proof, its modification by Hunt, and a later time-frequency proof by Fefferman; see Remark 18 below.)

247B, Notes 3: pseudodifferential operators

In contrast to previous notes, in this set of notes we shall focus exclusively on Fourier analysis in the one-dimensional setting for simplicity of notation, although all of the results here have natural extensions to higher dimensions. Depending on the physical context, one can view the physical domain as representing either space or time; we will mostly think in terms of the former interpretation, even though the standard terminology of “time-frequency analysis”, which we will make more prominent use of in later notes, clearly originates from the latter.

In previous notes we have often performed various localisations in either physical space or Fourier space , for instance in order to take advantage of the uncertainty principle. One can formalise these operations in terms of the functional calculus of two basic operations on Schwartz functions , the position operator defined by

and the momentum operator , defined by

(The terminology comes from quantum mechanics, where it is customary to also insert a small constant on the right-hand side of (1) in accordance with de Broglie’s law. Such a normalisation is also used in several branches of mathematics, most notably semiclassical analysis and microlocal analysis, where it becomes profitable to consider the semiclassical limit , but we will not emphasise this perspective here.) The momentum operator can be viewed as the counterpart to the position operator, but in frequency space instead of physical space, since we have the standard identity

for any and . We observe that both operators are formally self-adjoint in the sense that

for all , where we use the Hermitian inner product

Clearly, for any polynomial of one real variable (with complex coefficients), the operator is given by the spatial multiplier operator

and similarly the operator is given by the Fourier multiplier operator

Inspired by this, if is any smooth function that obeys the derivative bounds

for all and (that is to say, all derivatives of grow at most polynomially), then we can define the spatial multiplier operator by the formula

one can easily verify from several applications of the Leibniz rule that maps Schwartz functions to Schwartz functions. We refer to as the symbol of this spatial multiplier operator. In a similar fashion, we define the Fourier multiplier operator associated to the symbol by the formula

For instance, any constant coefficient linear differential operators can be written in this notation as

however there are many Fourier multiplier operators that are not of this form, such as fractional derivative operators for non-integer values of , which is a Fourier multiplier operator with symbol . It is also very common to use spatial cutoffs and Fourier cutoffs for various bump functions to localise functions in either space or frequency; we have seen several examples of such cutoffs in action in previous notes (often in the higher dimensional setting ).

We observe that the maps and are ring homomorphisms, thus for instance

and

for any obeying the derivative bounds (2); also is formally adjoint to in the sense that

for , and similarly for and . One can interpret these facts as part of the functional calculus of the operators , which can be interpreted as densely defined self-adjoint operators on . However, in this set of notes we will not develop the spectral theory necessary in order to fully set out this functional calculus rigorously.

In the field of PDE and ODE, it is also very common to study variable coefficient linear differential operators

where the are now functions of the spatial variable obeying the derivative bounds (2). A simple example is the quantum harmonic oscillator Hamiltonian . One can rewrite this operator in our notation as

and so it is natural to interpret this operator as a combination of both the position operator and the momentum operator , where the symbol this operator is the function

Indeed, from the Fourier inversion formula

for any we have

and hence on multiplying by and summing we have

Inspired by this, we can introduce the Kohn-Nirenberg quantisation by defining the operator by the formula

whenever and is any smooth function obeying the derivative bounds

for all and (note carefully that the exponent in on the right-hand side is required to be uniform in ). This quantisation clearly generalises both the spatial multiplier operators and the Fourier multiplier operators defined earlier, which correspond to the cases when the symbol is a function of only or only respectively. Thus we have combined the physical space and the frequency space into a single domain, known as phase space . The term “time-frequency analysis” encompasses analysis based on decompositions and other manipulations of phase space, in much the same way that “Fourier analysis” encompasses analysis based on decompositions and other manipulations of frequency space. We remark that the Kohn-Nirenberg quantization is not the only choice of quantization one could use; see Remark 19 below.

Exercise 1

• (i) Show that for obeying (6), that does indeed map to .
• (ii) Show that the symbol is uniquely determined by the operator . That is to say, if are two functions obeying (6) with for all , then . (Hint: apply to a suitable truncation of a plane wave and then take limits.)

In principle, the quantisations are potentially very useful for such tasks as inverting variable coefficient linear operators, or to localize a function simultaneously in physical and Fourier space. However, a fundamental difficulty arises: map from symbols to operators is now no longer a ring homomorphism, in particular

in general. Fundamentally, this is due to the fact that pointwise multiplication of symbols is a commutative operation, whereas the composition of operators such as and does not necessarily commute. This lack of commutativity can be measured by introducing the commutator

of two operators , and noting from the product rule that

(In the language of Lie groups and Lie algebras, this tells us that are (up to complex constants) the standard Lie algebra generators of the Heisenberg group.) From a quantum mechanical perspective, this lack of commutativity is the root cause of the uncertainty principle that prevents one from simultaneously localizing in both position and momentum past a certain point. Here is one basic way of formalising this principle:

Exercise 2 (Heisenberg uncertainty principle) For any and , show that

(Hint: evaluate the expression in two different ways and apply the Cauchy-Schwarz inequality.) Informally, this exercise asserts that the spatial uncertainty and the frequency uncertainty of a function obey the Heisenberg uncertainty relation .

Nevertheless, one still has the correspondence principle, which asserts that in certain regimes (which, with our choice of normalisations, corresponds to the high-frequency regime), quantum mechanics continues to behave like a commutative theory, and one can sometimes proceed as if the operators (and the various operators constructed from them) commute up to “lower order” errors. This can be formalised using the pseudodifferential calculus, which we give below the fold, in which we restrict the symbol to certain “symbol classes” of various orders (which then restricts to be pseudodifferential operators of various orders), and obtains approximate identities such as

where the error between the left and right-hand sides is of “lower order” and can in fact enjoys a useful asymptotic expansion. As a first approximation to this calculus, one can think of functions as having some sort of “phase space portrait” which somehow combines the physical space representation with its Fourier representation , and pseudodifferential operators behave approximately like “phase space multiplier operators” in this representation in the sense that

Unfortunately the uncertainty principle (or the non-commutativity of and ) prevents us from making these approximations perfectly precise, and it is not always clear how to even define a phase space portrait of a function precisely (although there are certain popular candidates for such a portrait, such as the FBI transform (also known as the Gabor transform in signal processing literature), or the Wigner quasiprobability distribution, each of which have some advantages and disadvantages). Nevertheless even if the concept of a phase space portrait is somewhat fuzzy, it is of great conceptual benefit both within mathematics and outside of it. For instance, the musical score one assigns a piece of music can be viewed as a phase space portrait of the sound waves generated by that music.

To complement the pseudodifferential calculus we have the basic Calderón-Vaillancourt theorem, which asserts that pseudodifferential operators of order zero are Calderón-Zygmund operators and thus bounded on for . The standard proof of this theorem is a classic application of one of the basic techniques in harmonic analysis, namely the exploitation of almost orthogonality; the proof we will give here will achieve this through the elegant device of the Cotlar-Stein lemma.

Pseudodifferential operators (especially when generalised to higher dimensions ) are a fundamental tool in the theory of linear PDE, as well as related fields such as semiclassical analysis, microlocal analysis, and geometric quantisation. There is an even wider class of operators that is also of interest, namely the Fourier integral operators, which roughly speaking not only approximately multiply the phase space portrait of a function by some multiplier , but also move the portrait around by a canonical transformation. However, the development of theory of these operators is beyond the scope of these notes; see for instance the texts of Hormander or Eskin.

This set of notes is only the briefest introduction to the theory of pseudodifferential operators. Many texts are available that cover the theory in more detail, for instance this text of Taylor.

247B, Notes 2: Decoupling theory

The square root cancellation heuristic, briefly mentioned in the preceding set of notes, predicts that if a collection of complex numbers have phases that are sufficiently “independent” of each other, then

similarly, if are a collection of functions in a Lebesgue space that oscillate “independently” of each other, then we expect

We have already seen one instance in which this heuristic can be made precise, namely when the phases of are randomised by a random sign, so that Khintchine’s inequality (Lemma 4 from Notes 1) can be applied. There are other contexts in which a square function estimate

or a reverse square function estimate

(or both) are known or conjectured to hold. For instance, the useful Littlewood-Paley inequality implies (among other things) that for any , we have the reverse square function estimate

whenever the Fourier transforms of the are supported on disjoint annuli , and we also have the matching square function estimate

if there is some separation between the annuli (for instance if the are -separated). We recall the proofs of these facts below the fold. In the case, we of course have Pythagoras’ theorem, which tells us that if the are all orthogonal elements of , then

In particular, this identity holds if the have disjoint Fourier supports in the sense that their Fourier transforms are supported on disjoint sets. For , the technique of bi-orthogonality can also give square function and reverse square function estimates in some cases, as we shall also see below the fold.
In recent years, it has begun to be realised that in the regime , a variant of reverse square function estimates such as (1) is also useful, namely decoupling estimates such as

(actually in practice we often permit small losses such as on the right-hand side). An estimate such as (2) is weaker than (1) when (or equal when ), as can be seen by starting with the triangle inequality

and taking the square root of both side to conclude that

However, the flip side of this weakness is that (2) can be easier to prove. One key reason for this is the ability to iterate decoupling estimates such as (2), in a way that does not seem to be possible with reverse square function estimates such as (1). For instance, suppose that one has a decoupling inequality such as (2), and furthermore each can be split further into components for which one has the decoupling inequalities

Then by inserting these bounds back into (2) we see that we have the combined decoupling inequality

This iterative feature of decoupling inequalities means that such inequalities work well with the method of induction on scales, that we introduced in the previous set of notes.
In fact, decoupling estimates share many features in common with restriction theorems; in addition to induction on scales, there are several other techniques that first emerged in the restriction theory literature, such as wave packet decompositions, rescaling, and bilinear or multilinear reductions, that turned out to also be well suited to proving decoupling estimates. As with restriction, the curvature or transversality of the different Fourier supports of the will be crucial in obtaining non-trivial estimates.
Strikingly, in many important model cases, the optimal decoupling inequalities (except possibly for epsilon losses in the exponents) are now known. These estimates have in turn had a number of important applications, such as establishing certain discrete analogues of the restriction conjecture, or the first proof of the main conjecture for Vinogradov mean value theorems in analytic number theory.
These notes only serve as a brief introduction to decoupling. A systematic exploration of this topic can be found in this recent text of Demeter.

247B, Notes 1: Restriction theory

This set of notes focuses on the restriction problem in Fourier analysis. Introduced by Elias Stein in the 1970s, the restriction problem is a key model problem for understanding more general oscillatory integral operators, and which has turned out to be connected to many questions in geometric measure theory, harmonic analysis, combinatorics, number theory, and PDE. Only partial results on the problem are known, but these partial results have already proven to be very useful or influential in many applications.
We work in a Euclidean space . Recall that is the space of -power integrable functions , quotiented out by almost everywhere equivalence, with the usual modifications when . If then the Fourier transform will be defined in this course by the formula

From the dominated convergence theorem we see that is a continuous function; from the Riemann-Lebesgue lemma we see that it goes to zero at infinity. Thus lies in the space of continuous functions that go to zero at infinity, which is a subspace of . Indeed, from the triangle inequality it is obvious that

If , then Plancherel’s theorem tells us that we have the identity

Because of this, there is a unique way to extend the Fourier transform from to , in such a way that it becomes a unitary map from to itself. By abuse of notation we continue to denote this extension of the Fourier transform by . Strictly speaking, this extension is no longer defined in a pointwise sense by the formula (1) (indeed, the integral on the RHS ceases to be absolutely integrable once leaves ; we will return to the (surprisingly difficult) question of whether pointwise convergence continues to hold (at least in an almost everywhere sense) later in this course, when we discuss Carleson’s theorem. On the other hand, the formula (1) remains valid in the sense of distributions, and in practice most of the identities and inequalities one can show about the Fourier transform of “nice” functions (e.g., functions in , or in the Schwartz class , or test function class ) can be extended to functions in “rough” function spaces such as by standard limiting arguments.
By (2), (3), and the Riesz-Thorin interpolation theorem, we also obtain the Hausdorff-Young inequality

for all and , where is the dual exponent to , defined by the usual formula . (One can improve this inequality by a constant factor, with the optimal constant worked out by Beckner, but the focus in these notes will not be on optimal constants.) As a consequence, the Fourier transform can also be uniquely extended as a continuous linear map from . (The situation with is much worse; see below the fold.)
The restriction problem asks, for a given exponent and a subset of , whether it is possible to meaningfully restrict the Fourier transform of a function to the set . If the set has positive Lebesgue measure, then the answer is yes, since lies in and therefore has a meaningful restriction to even though functions in are only defined up to sets of measure zero. But what if has measure zero? If , then is continuous and therefore can be meaningfully restricted to any set . At the other extreme, if and is an arbitrary function in , then by Plancherel’s theorem, is also an arbitrary function in , and thus has no well-defined restriction to any set of measure zero.
It was observed by Stein (as reported in the Ph.D. thesis of Charlie Fefferman) that for certain measure zero subsets of , such as the sphere , one can obtain meaningful restrictions of the Fourier transforms of functions for certain between and , thus demonstrating that the Fourier transform of such functions retains more structure than a typical element of :

Theorem 1 (Preliminary restriction theorem) If and , then one has the estimate

for all Schwartz functions , where denotes surface measure on the sphere . In particular, the restriction can be meaningfully defined by continuous linear extension to an element of .

Proof: Fix . We expand out

From (1) and Fubini’s theorem, the right-hand side may be expanded as

where the inverse Fourier transform of the measure is defined by the formula

In other words, we have the identity

using the Hermitian inner product . Since the sphere have bounded measure, we have from the triangle inequality that

Also, from the method of stationary phase (as covered in the previous class 247A), or Bessel function asymptotics, we have the decay

for any (note that the bound already follows from (6) unless ). We remark that the exponent here can be seen geometrically from the following considerations. For , the phase on the sphere is stationary at the two antipodal points of the sphere, and constant on the tangent hyperplanes to the sphere at these points. The wavelength of this phase is proportional to , so the phase would be approximately stationary on a cap formed by intersecting the sphere with a neighbourhood of the tangent hyperplane to one of the stationary points. As the sphere is tangent to second order at these points, this cap will have diameter in the directions of the -dimensional tangent space, so the cap will have surface measure , which leads to the prediction (7). We combine (6), (7) into the unified estimate

where the “Japanese bracket” is defined as . Since lies in precisely when , we conclude that

Applying Young’s convolution inequality, we conclude (after some arithmetic) that

whenever , and the claim now follows from (5) and Hölder’s inequality.

Remark 2 By using the Hardy-Littlewood-Sobolev inequality in place of Young’s convolution inequality, one can also establish this result for .

Motivated by this result, given any Radon measure on and any exponents , we use to denote the claim that the restriction estimate

for all Schwartz functions ; if is a -dimensional submanifold of (possibly with boundary), we write for where is the -dimensional surface measure on . Thus, for instance, we trivially always have , while Theorem 1 asserts that holds whenever . We will not give a comprehensive survey of restriction theory in these notes, but instead focus on some model results that showcase some of the basic techniques in the field. (I have a more detailed survey on this topic from 2003, but it is somewhat out of date.)

Course announcement: Math 247B, Classical Fourier Analysis

Next quarter, starting March 30, I will be teaching “Math 247B: Classical Fourier Analysis” here at UCLA.  (The course should more accurately be named “Modern real-variable harmonic analysis”, but we have not gotten around to implementing such a name change.) This class (a continuation of Math 247A from previous quarter, taught by my colleague, Monica Visan) will cover the following topics:

• Restriction theory and Strichartz estimates
• Decoupling estimates and applications
• Paraproducts; time frequency analysis; Carleson’s theorem

As usual, lecture notes will be made available on this blog.

Unlike previous courses, this one will be given online as part of UCLA’s social distancing efforts.  In particular, the course will be open to anyone with an internet connection (no UCLA affiliation is required), though non-UCLA participants will not have full access to all aspects of the course, and there is the possibility that some restrictions on participation may be imposed if there are significant disruptions to class activity.  For more information, see the course description.  UPDATE: due to time limitations, I will not be able to respond to personal email inquiries about this class from non-UCLA participants in the course.  Please use the comment thread to this blog post for such inquiries.  I will also update the course description throughout the course to reflect the latest information about the course, both for UCLA students enrolled in the course and for non-UCLA participants.