On New Families of Fractional Sobolev Spaces

Abstract: This paper presents three new families of fractional Sobolev spaces and their accompanying theory in one-dimension. The new construction and theory are based on a newly developed notion of weak fractional derivatives, which are natural generalizations of the well-established integer order Sobolev spaces and theory. In particular, two new families of one-sided fractional Sobolev spaces are introduced and analyzed, they reveal more insights about another family of so-called symmetric fractional Sobolev spaces. Many key theorems/properties, such as density/approximation theorem, extension theorems, one-sided trace theorem, and various embedding theorems and Sobolev inequalities in those Sobolev spaces are established. Moreover, a few relationships with existing fractional Sobolev spaces are also discovered. The results of this paper lay down a solid theoretical foundation for systematically developing a fractional calculus of variations theory and a fractional PDE theory as well as their numerical solutions in subsequent works. This paper is a concise presentation of the materials of Sections 1, 4 and 5 of reference [7].