Sobolev spaces and $$\nabla $$-differential operators on manifolds I: basic properties and weighted spaces

Abstract

We study covariant Sobolev spaces and $$\nabla $$ -differential operators with coefficients in general Hermitian vector bundles on Riemannian manifolds, stressing a coordinate-free approach that uses connections (which are typically denoted $$\nabla $$ ). These concepts arise naturally from geometric partial differential equations, including some that are formulated on plain Euclidean domains, for instance, from problems formulated on the boundary of smooth domains or in relation to the weighted Sobolev spaces used to study PDEs on polyhedral domains. We prove several basic properties of the covariant Sobolev spaces and of the $$\nabla $$ -differential operators on general manifolds. For instance, we prove mapping properties for our differential operators and the independence of the covariant Sobolev spaces on the choices of the connection $$\nabla $$ , as long as the new connection is obtained using a totally bounded perturbation. We also introduce the Fréchet finiteness condition (FFC) for totally bounded vector fields, which is satisfied, for instance, by open subsets of manifolds with bounded geometry. When (FFC) is satisfied, we provide several equivalent definitions of our covariant Sobolev spaces and of our $$\nabla $$ -differential operators. We also introduce and study the notion of a $$\nabla $$ -bidifferential operator (a bilinear version of differential operators), obtaining results similar to those obtained for $$\nabla $$ -differential operators. Bilinear differential operators are necessary for a global, geometric discussion of variational problems. We tried to write the paper so that it is accessible to a large audience.