The Frank-Lieb approach to sharp Sobolev inequalities

Abstract: Frank and Lieb gave a new, rearrangement-free, proof of the sharp Hardy-Littlewood-Sobolev inequalities by exploiting their conformal covariance. Using this they gave new proofs of sharp Sobolev inequalities for the embeddings $W^{k,2}(\mathbb{R}^n)\hookrightarrow L^{\frac{2n}{n-2k}}(\mathbb{R}^n)$. We show that their argument gives a direct proof of the latter inequalities without passing through Hardy-Littlewood-Sobolev inequalities, and, moreover, a new proof of a sharp fully nonlinear Sobolev inequality involving the $\sigma_2$-curvature. Our argument relies on nice commutator identities deduced using the Fefferman-Graham ambient metric.