Atomic and Maximal Function Characterizations of Musielak-Orlicz-Hardy Spaces Associated to Non-negative Self-adjoint Operators on Spaces of Homogeneous Type

Abstract: Let $\mathcal{X}$ be a metric space with doubling measure and $L$ a non-negative self-adjoint operator on $L^2(\mathcal{X})$ whose heat kernels satisfy the Gaussian upper bound estimates. Assume that the growth function $\varphi:\ \mathcal{X}\times[0,\infty) \to[0,\infty)$ satisfies that $\varphi(x,\cdot)$ is an Orlicz function and $\varphi(\cdot,t)\in {\mathbb A}{\infty}(\mathcal{X})$ (the class of uniformly Muckenhoupt weights). Let $H{\varphi,\,L}(\mathcal{X})$ be the Musielak-Orlicz-Hardy space defined via the Lusin area function associated with the heat semigroup of $L$. In this article, the authors characterize the space $H_{\varphi,\,L}(\mathcal{X})$ by means of atoms, non-tangential and radial maximal functions associated with $L$. In particular, when $\mu(\mathcal{X})<\infty$, the local non-tangential and radial maximal function characterizations of $H_{\varphi,\,L}(\mathcal{X})$ are obtained. As applications, the authors obtain various maximal function and the atomic characterizations of the "geometric" Musielak-Orlicz-Hardy spaces $H_{\varphi,\,r}(\Omega)$ and $H_{\varphi,\,z}(\Omega)$ on the strongly Lipschitz domain $\Omega$ in $\mathbb{R}^n$ associated with second-order self-adjoint elliptic operators with the Dirichlet and the Neumann boundary conditions; even when $\varphi(x,t):=t$ for any $x\in\mathbb{R}^n$ and $t\in[0,\infty)$, the equivalent characterizations of $H_{\varphi,\,z}(\Omega)$ given in this article improve the known results via removing the assumption that $\Omega$ is unbounded.