Hardy and Rellich Inequalities with Bessel Pairs

Abstract In this paper, we establish suitable characterisations for a pair of functions $(W(x),H(x))$ on a bounded, connected domain $\Omega \subset \mathbb{R}^n$ in order to have the following Hardy inequality: \begin{equation*} \int_{\Omega} W(x) |\nabla u|_A^2 dx \geq \int_{\Omega} |\nabla d|^2_AH(x)|u|^2 dx, \,\,\, u \in C^{1}_0(\Omega), \end{equation*} where d ( x ) is a suitable quasi-norm (gauge), $|\xi|^2_A = \langle A(x)\xi, \xi \rangle$ for $\xi \in \mathbb{R}^n$ and A ( x ) is an n × n symmetric, uniformly positive definite matrix defined on a bounded domain $\Omega \subset \mathbb{R}^n$ . We also give its L p analogue. As a consequence, we present examples for a standard Laplacian on $\mathbb{R}^n$ , Baouendi–Grushin operator, and sub-Laplacians on the Heisenberg group, the Engel group and the Cartan group. Those kind of characterisations for a pair of functions $(W(x),H(x))$ are obtained also for the Rellich inequality. These results answer the open problems of Ghoussoub-Moradifam [16].