Regularity and continuity of the multilinear strong maximal operators

Abstract: Let $m\ge 1$, in this paper, our object of investigation is the regularity and and continuity properties of the following multilinear strong maximal operator $${\mathscr{M}}{\mathcal{R}}(\vec{f})(x)=\sup{\substack{R \ni x R\in\mathcal{R}}}\prod\limits_{i=1}^m\frac{1}{|R|}\int_{R}|f_i(y)|dy,$$ where $x\in\mathbb{R}^d$ and $\mathcal{R}$ denotes the family of all rectangles in $\mathbb{R}^d$ with sides parallel to the axes. When $m=1$, denote $\mathscr{M}{\mathcal{R}}$ by $\mathcal {M}{\mathcal{R}}$.Then, $\mathcal {M}{\mathcal{R}}$ coincides with the classical strong maximal function initially studied by Jessen, Marcinkiewicz and Zygmund. We showed that ${\mathscr{M}}{\mathcal{R}}$ is bounded and continuous from the Sobolev spaces $W^{1,p_1}(\mathbb{R}^d)\times \cdots\times W^{1,p_m}(\mathbb{R}^d)$ to $W^{1,p} (\mathbb{R}^d)$, from the Besov spaces $B_{s}^{p_1,q} (\mathbb{R}^d)\times\cdots\times B_s^{p_m,q}(\mathbb{R}^d)$ to $B_s^{p,q}(\mathbb{R}^d)$, from the Triebel-Lizorkin spaces $F_{s}^{p_1,q}(\mathbb{R}^d)\times\cdots\times F_s^{p_m,q}(\mathbb{R}^d)$ to $F_s^{p,q}(\mathbb{R}^d)$. As a consequence, we further showed that ${\mathscr{M}}{\mathcal{R}}$ is bounded and continuous from the fractional Sobolev spaces $W^{s,p_1}(\mathbb{R}^d)\times \cdots\times W^{s,p_m}(\mathbb{R}^d)$ to $W^{s,p}(\mathbb{R}^d)$ for $0<s\leq 1$ and $1<p<\infty$. As an application, we obtain a weak type inequality for the Sobolev capacity, which can be used to prove the $p$-quasicontinuity of $\mathscr{M}{\mathcal{R}}$. The discrete type of the strong maximal operators has also been considered. We showed that this discrete type of the maximal operators enjoys somewhat unexpected regularity properties.