The Hardy–Rellich Inequality and Uncertainty Principle on the Sphere

Abstract

Let $\Delta _0$ be the Laplace–Beltrami operator on the unit sphere $\mathbb {S}^{d-1}$ of ${\mathbb R}^d$. We show that the Hardy–Rellich inequality of the form

$$\begin{aligned} \mathop \int \limits _{\mathbb {S}^{d-1}} \left| f (x)\right| ^2 \mathrm{d}{\sigma }(x) \le c_d \min _{e\in \mathbb {S}^{d-1}} \mathop \int \limits _{\mathbb {S}^{d-1}} (1- {\langle }x, e {\rangle }) \left| (-\Delta _0)^{\frac{1}{2}}f(x) \right| ^2 \mathrm{d}{\sigma }(x) \end{aligned}$$

holds for $d =2$ and $d \ge 4$ but does not hold for $d=3$ with any finite constant, and the optimal constant for the inequality is $c_d = 8/(d-3)^2$ for $d =2, 4, 5,$ and, under additional restrictions on the function space, for $d\ge 6$. This inequality yields an uncertainty principle of the form

$$\begin{aligned} \min _{e\in \mathbb {S}^{d-1}} \mathop \int \limits _{\mathbb {S}^{d-1}} (1- {\langle }x, e {\rangle }) |f(x)|^2 \mathrm{d}{\sigma }(x) \mathop \int \limits _{\mathbb {S}^{d-1}}\left| \nabla _0 f(x)\right| ^2 \mathrm{d}{\sigma }(x) \ge c'_d \end{aligned}$$

on the sphere for functions with zero mean and unit norm, which can be used to establish another uncertainty principle without zero mean assumption, both of which appear to be new.