Sobolev regularity of solutions of the cohomological equation

Giovanni Forni

Published 2007-07-06, updated 2007-07-12Version 2

We refine the theory of the cohomological equation for translation flows on higher genus surfaces with the goal of proving optimal results on the Sobolev regularity of solutions and of distributional obstructions. For typical translation surfaces our results are sharp and we find the expected relation between the regularity of the distributional obstructions and the Lyapunov exponents of the Kontsevich-Zorich renormalization cocycle. As a consequence we exactly determine the dimension of the space of obstructions in each Sobolev regularity class in terms of the Kontsevich-Zorich exponents. For a fixed arbitrary translation surface and a typical direction, our results are probably not optimal but are the best which can be achieved with the available harmonic analysis techniques we have introduced in an earlier paper.