The BMO-Dirichlet problem for elliptic systems in the upper-half space and quantitative characterizations of VMO

José María Martell, Dorina Mitrea, Irina Mitrea, Marius Mitrea

Published 2016-05-26Version 1

We prove that for any homogeneous, second order, constant complex coefficient elliptic system $L$, the Dirichlet problem in $\mathbb{R}^{n}_{+}$ with boundary data in BMO is well-posed in the class of functions $u$ with $d\mu_u(x',t):=|\nabla u(x',t)|^2\,t\,dx'dt$ being a Carleson measure. We establish a Fatou type theorem guaranteeing the existence of the pointwise nontangential boundary trace for smooth null-solutions $u$ of such systems satisfying the said Carleson measure condition. These results imply that BMO can be characterized as the collection of nontangential pointwise traces of smooth null-solutions $u$ to the elliptic system $L$ with the property that $\mu_u$ is a Carleson measure. We also establish a regularity result for the BMO-Dirichlet problem in the upper-half space: the nontangential pointwise trace of any given smooth null-solutions of $L$ satisfying the above Carleson measure condition actually belongs to Sarason's space VMO if and only if $\mu_u$ satsifies a vanishing Carleson measure condition. Moreover, we are able to establish the well-posedness of the Dirichlet problems when the boundary data are prescribed in Morrey-Campanato and solutions are required to satisfy a vanishing Carleson measure condition of fractional order. Finally, we succeed in producing characterizations of the space VMO as the closure in BMO of classes of smooth functions contained in BMO within which uniform continuity may be suitably quantified (such as the class of smooth functions satisfying a H\"older or Lipschitz condition). This improves on Sarason's classical result describing VMO as the closure in BMO of the space of uniformly continuous functions with bounded mean oscillations.