Defect of compactness for Sobolev spaces on manifolds with bounded geometry

Abstract

Defect of compactness, relative to an embedding of two Banach spaces E and F, is a difference between a weakly convergent sequence in E and its weak limit taken up to a remainder that vanishes in the norm of F. For Sobolev embeddings in particular, defect of compactness is expressed as a profile decomposition - a sum of terms, called elementary concentrations, with asymptotically disjoint supports. We discuss a profile decomposition for the Sobolev space of a Riemannian manifold with bounded geometry, which is a sum of elementary concentrations associated with concentration profiles defined on manifolds different from M, that are induced by a limiting procedure. The profiles satisfy an inequality of Plancherel type, and a similar relation, related to the Brezis-Lieb Lemma, holds for Lebesgue norms of profiles on the respective manifolds.