The Modulus of p-Variation and Its Applications

Abstract

Let \(\nu \) be a nondecreasing concave sequence of positive real numbers and \(1\le p<\infty \). In this note, we introduce the notion of modulus of p-variation for a function of a real variable, and show that it serves in at least two important problems, namely, the uniform convergence of Fourier series and computation of certain K-functionals. Using this new tool, we first define a Banach space, denoted \(V_p[\nu ]\), that is a natural unification of the Wiener class \(BV_p\) and the Chanturiya class \(V[\nu ]\). Then we prove that \(V_p[\nu ]\) satisfies a Helly-type selection principle which enables us to characterize continuous functions in \(V_p[\nu ]\) in terms of their Fejér means. We also prove that a certain K-functional for the couple \((C,BV_p)\) can be expressed in terms of the modulus of p-variation, where C denotes the space of continuous functions. Next, we obtain equivalent optimal conditions for the uniform convergence of the Fourier series of all functions in each of the classes \(C\cap V_p[\nu ]\) and \(H^\omega \cap V_p[\nu ]\), where \(\omega \) is a modulus of continuity and \(H^\omega \) denotes its associated Lipschitz class. Finally, we establish sharp embeddings into \(V_p[\nu ]\) of various spaces of functions of generalized bounded variation. As a by-product of these latter results, we infer embedding results for certain symmetric sequence spaces.