The book systematically develops the nonlinear potential theory connected with the weighted Sobolev spaces, where the weight usually belongs to Muckenhoupt's class of Ap weights. These spaces occur as solutions spaces for degenerate elliptic partial differential equations. The Sobolev space theory covers results concerning approximation, extension, and interpolation, Sobolev and Poincaré inequalities, Maz'ya type embedding theorems, and isoperimetric inequalities. In the chapter devoted to potential theory, several weighted capacities are investigated. Moreover, "Kellogg lemmas" are established for various concepts of thinness. Applications of potential theory to weighted Sobolev spaces include quasi continuity of Sobolev functions, Poincaré inequalities, and spectral synthesis theorems.

A systematic account of the subject, this book deals with properties and applications of the Sobolev spaces with weights, the weight function being dependent on the distance of a point of the definition domain from the boundary of the domain or from its parts. After an introduction of definitions, examples and auxilliary results, it describes the study of properties of Sobolev spaces with power-type weights, and analogous problems for weights of a more general type. The concluding chapter addresses applications of weighted spaces to the solution of the Dirichlet problem for an elliptic linear differential operator.

Sobolev spaces play an outstanding role in modern analysis, in particular, in the theory of partial differential equations and its applications in mathematical physics. They form an indispensable tool in approximation theory, spectral theory, differential geometry etc. The theory of these spaces is of interest in itself being a beautiful domain of mathematics. The present volume includes basics on Sobolev spaces, approximation and extension theorems, embedding and compactness theorems, their relations with isoperimetric and isocapacitary inequalities, capacities with applications to spectral theory of elliptic differential operators as well as pointwise inequalities for derivatives. The selection of topics is mainly influenced by the author’s involvement in their study, a considerable part of the text is a report on his work in the field. Part of this volume first appeared in German as three booklets of Teubner-Texte zur Mathematik (1979, 1980). In the Springer volume “Sobolev Spaces”, published in English in 1985, the material was expanded and revised. The present 2nd edition is enhanced by many recent results and it includes new applications to linear and nonlinear partial differential equations. New historical comments, five new chapters and a significantly augmented list of references aim to create a broader and modern view of the area.

We propose a new variational model in weighted Sobolev spaces with non-standard weights and applications to image processing. We show that these weights are, in general, not of Muckenhoupt type and therefore the classical analysis tools may not apply. For special cases of the weights, the resulting variational problem is known to be equivalent to the fractional Poisson problem. The trace space for the weighted Sobolev space is identified to be embedded in a weighted L2 space. We propose a finite element scheme to solve the Euler-Lagrange equations, and for the image denoising application we propose an algorithm to identify the unknown weights. The approach is illustrated on several test problems and it yields better results when compared to the existing total variation techniques.

This work covers the Sobolev spaces and their applications to many areas of differential equations. It deals with some basic results on Sobolev spaces, density theorems, and approximation theorems and embedding theorems.