Followed by this entry where the following questions have been discussed
- Boundedness implies weakly convergence: If
is a reflexive Banach space and
is a bounded sequence. Then up to a subsequence
converges weakly to some
in
.
- Weakly convergence becomes strongly convergence via compact operator: A compact operator
between Banach spaces maps every weakly convergent sequence in
into one that converges strongly in
.
Now I shall discuss more results which appear frequently in the calculus of variation.
Let us recall over a minifold , the Sobolev norm
(or
) is defined by
.
It is immediately to see that if strongly in
, i.e.
then
strongly in
and
strongly in
.
It turns out to discuss what happen to weakly convergence. Actually, we shall prove the following important result, called the third fundamental result.
Weakly convergence in Sobolev spaces implies weakly convergence in spaces. We assume
in
. We shall prove both
and
converge weakly to
and
in
, respectively.
By the principle of uniform boundedness, any weakly convergence sequence is bounded in the norm. Consequently, and
are bounded in
. By the weak compactness of balls in
, there is a subsequence
such that
in (i.e., both
are in
). Since the weak convergence in
implies the convergence in
the dual space of
-the space of test functions. It follows that
and, hence,
. It follows that
and thus
in as desired.
Now we consider the reverse case. We shall prove the following
Weakly convergence in spaces plus the boundedness implies weakly convergence in Sobolev spaces. We assume
in
and
is bounded. We shall prove that
and
in
.
Since is bounded in
, by the first fundamental result,
in
for some
. By the third fundamental result above,
in
. It follows from the uniqueness of weak limit that
which implies
.
In order to prove in
, we shall use the following result whose proof is based on the simple contradiction argument.
Let
be a topological space. A sequence
converges to
(in the topological of
) if and only if any subsequence of
contains a sub-subsequence that converges to
.
Let us pick a particular subsequence of and rename it back to
for simplicity. It suffices to prove that
contains a subsequence that converges to
weakly in
. Followed the proof of the third fundamental result, there is a subsequence of
and a function
such that
both in . It follows from the definition of weakly convergence in
that in fact we get
in . The reason is the following:
for any . Having this and the fact that weak limit is unique we deduce that
. The latter now implies
in . The proof follows.
See also: Two fundamental results in the calculus of variation
denote a convex subset of a locally convex topological linear space
. Show that the closure
of
as following
. Then
is continuous and
since
due to the continuity of
for every
. Therefore