1. Introduction
The problem of approximation by holomorphic functions in one or several complex variables has been a central theme in complex analysis and finds it applications in many branches of mathematical physics such as systems identification, signal processing, inverse problems for partial differential equations, and operator theory (cf. [
1]).
Holomorphic approximation in one complex variable goes back to Mergelyan [
2] who proved that if
K is a compact set in the complex plane and its complement in
has just one connected component, then every continuous function on
K which is holomorphic in the interior of
K can be approximated on
K by holomorphic functions in a neighborhood of
K.
Analogous problems in several complex variables were first investigated independently by Henkin [
3], Lieb [
4], and Kerzman [
5] for strictly pseudoconvex domains with sufficiently smooth boundaries in
, and subsequently improved by Fornæss [
6] for domains with
-smooth boundaries.
In particular, Kerzman [
5] proved that if
D is a strongly pseudoconvex domain with
-boundary in
(or in a Stein manifold),
, then every holomorphic function in
can be approximated on
by holomorphic functions on a neighborhood of
in the scale of
-norm,
.
In the
-topology, the problem was first handled by Ahern-Schneider [
7] and Lieb-Range [
8]. Other generalizations can be found in [
9].
The key technical tools needed to prove the above results were the existence of a Stein neighborhood basis for and the integral solution operators for with estimates in those topologies.
For weakly pseudoconvex domains, Fornæss and Nagel [
10] proved that if
D is a smoothly bounded pseudoconvex domain with real analytic boundary, then every function continuous on
, holomorphic in
D, and can be approximated uniformly on
by holomorphic functions on a neighborhood of
.
Moreover, Cho proved in [
11] that if
D is a smoothly bounded pseudoconvex domain of finite type in
, then every holomorphic function in the
-Sobolev space
,
,
, can be approximated on
by holomorphic functions on a neighborhood of
in the
-norm. In addition, he obtained the same result for the usual Lipschitz space. His key ingredient was the stability of the estimates for
in the
-setting.
Recently, Kim [
12] extended those results obtained in [
5] for certain convex ellipsoids of finite/infinite type in
. His proof is based on
-bounds in the additive Cousin problem via solvability of
with
-estimates on such domains.
On the other hand, Diederich and Fornæss [
13] gave an example of smoothly bounded pseudoconvex domain
D in
known as “worm domain“ for which the Mergelyan property fails. Their example is based on the presence of a Levi-flat hypersurface in
having an annular leaf with infinitesimally nontrivial holonomy.
The main object of this paper is to prove the Mergelyan property on certain class of weakly pseudoconvex domains in , , in different topologies like -topology or -topology on compact subsets, taking for granted the existence of -solving bounded solution operators with estimation in the corresponding norms.
2. Results
Before formulating our first result, we recall from [
14] the following definition.
Definition 1. Let be a weakly pseudoconvex type domain defined bywhere ϕ is a real-valued function ϕ on such that - (a)
and ;
- (b)
; ;
- (c)
; ;
- (d)
there is so that , .
We denote by
the Banach space of
-forms on
with
-coefficients. The following
-existence theorem for
on such domain
was proved in [
14].
Theorem 1. Let be given as above and assume that . Let , . Then there exist integral kernels such that the integral is absolutely convergent for almost all and defines linear solution operators to the equation in provided that , where is the Lebesgue measure on . In addition, if , , then for each p there is a constant , independent of f, satisfying the estimatesIf f is then also is . For , define , . Then satisfies all conditions (a)–(d). In this case the domain is of infinite type and satisfying the conditions of Theorem 1 if and only if .
For a bounded domain D in , we denote by the set of all holomorphic functions on D and by the set of continuous functions on D. By we denote the set of all holomorphic functions in , . Finally, denotes the weak-star closure of the algebra of functions that are continuous on and holomorphic in D.
Now we formulate our first result which concerns approximating by functions that are holomorphic in some neighborhood of in -spaces.
Theorem 2. Let be as in Theorem 1. Then every function in can be approximated in -norm by functions in for all . For , there is a constant , such that every f in can be approximated by a sequence in in -norm, , such that for all . Moreover, if f extends continuously to , then uniformly on .
Remark 1. It worth remarking that:
- (i)
This theorem was very recently obtained in [
12]
for domains in satisfying slightly general conditions than ours. - (ii)
A simple example of a pseudoconvex domain for which this result fails is the Hartogs triangle . The holomorphic function on H is bounded by one, and it cannot be approximated in any natural sense by holomorphic functions in neighborhoods of since its restriction to horizontal slices has winding number . Note that is not a Stein compact. One can also see that it fails on the Diederich-Fornæss worm domain [
13].
Let
D be the complex ellipsoid in
where
Denote by
the space of all continuous
-forms on
D and having continuous derivatives up to
on
D satisfying Holder condition of order
. The corresponding norm is denoted by
. The following result has been proved in [
15].
Theorem 3. Let be a complex ellipsoid in defined as above. Let . Then there are linear solution operators such that for every -closed form , . If in addition , , , then there exists a constant such that This theorem enables us to prove our second result on -holomorphic approximation on complex ellipsoids.
Theorem 4. Let D be the complex ellipsoid given as in Theorem 3. Then for every function f in , , there is a sequence of functions in such that .
Our approach in the proofs of Theorems 2 and 4 is to cover by finitely many open charts, approximate the function in by a holomorphic function in each of the charts and patch these local approximations into a global one by solving an additive Cousin problem with bounds for locally defined forms or functions via estimates for in the corresponding or settings.
For any two expressions A and B which depending on several parameter, we will use to mean that there is a constant C independent of the parameters under consideration such that . Since the proof of Theorem 4 will be very similar to that of Theorem 2 then we will present a detailed proof for Theorem 2 only.
4. Proof of Theorem 2
The proof follows by using arguments from [
16]. Cover
by finitely many neighborhoods
of boundary points
such that for each
there is a constant
so that if
is the inner unit normal to
at
, then
for all
and
.
The family of open sets forms an open cover of provided that is chosen sufficiently small. We then have the following local approximating Lemma.
Lemma 1. Let , . For define and for . Then we have the following statements:
- (A)
for ,
- (B)
pointwise on ,
- (C)
If or and f is in
Proof. Statements (A) and (B) follow obviously from the definitions of
and
. For
, Equation (
6) follows from the fact that translation defines a continuous operator on
-spaces. For
, it follows from the uniform continuity of
f. □
Unfortunately, those local approximating functions
do not match up together to form a global holomorphic function on the closure of
D, because
will in general be different from zero if
. However, we have
Corollary 1. DefineandThenand in addition, if , we have Proof. The inequality (
9) is obvious. For (
8), fix
i and
j and set
, then
and by (
6), we obtain
since
as
. This implies (
8) for
. The case when
follows also from the uniform continuity of
f. □
End Proof of Theorem 2
Choose
and
so that
on a neighborhood
W of
. For each
we choose
such that
It is obvious that
as
. By choosing
small enough, we can achieve that
If is sufficiently small, we see moreover that the integral kernels are well-defined for , and so there are -solving linear operators . Since the derivatives of the defining function of are independent of and the volume of is bounded by a constant independent of for , then the -estimates given by Theorem 1 for the operators are independent of for .
Set
and apply Theorem 5 to the functions
, we get functions
such that
and there is a constant
, independent of
, satisfying the estimate
It follows from (
7) and (
10) that
Hence
defines a holomorphic function
on
so that
We finally estimate the
-norm of
as
. Since
, it follows from (
12) and (
11) that
If
either or
, from this last inequality together with (
6) and (
8), we see that
for all
.
For the case when
, using again (
12) and (
11) together with (
9), we get
where the constant
C is independent of
. Since
for all
, then (
13) still holds true for any
. This completes the proof of Theorem 2.