Improved Adams-type inequalities and their extremals in dimension 2m

Abstract: In this paper we prove the existence of extremal functions for the Adams-Moser-Trudinger inequality on the Sobolev space $H^{m}(\Omega)$, where $\Omega$ is any bounded, smooth, open subset of $\mathbb{R}^{2m}$, $m\ge 1$. Moreover, we extend this result to improved versions of Adams' inequality of Adimurthi-Druet type. Our strategy is based on blow-up analysis for sequences of subcritical extremals and introduces several new techniques and constructions. The most important one is a new procedure for obtaining capacity-type estimates on annular regions.