On the volume of unit balls of finite-dimensional Lorentz spaces

Abstract: We study the volume of unit balls $B^n_{p,q}$ of finite-dimensional Lorentz sequence spaces $\ell_{p,q}^n.$ We give an iterative formula for ${\rm vol}(B^n_{p,q})$ for the weak Lebesgue spaces with $q=\infty$ and explicit formulas for $q=1$ and $q=\infty.$ We derive asymptotic results for the $n$-th root of ${\rm vol}(B^n_{p,q})$ and show that $[{\rm vol}(B^n_{p,q})]^{1/n}\approx n^{-1/p}$ for all $0<p<\infty$ and $0<q\le\infty.$ We study further the ratio between the volume of unit balls of weak Lebesgue spaces and the volume of unit balls of classical Lebesgue spaces. We conclude with an application of the volume estimates and characterize the decay of the entropy numbers of the embedding of the weak Lebesgue space $\ell_{1,\infty}^n$ into $\ell_1^n.$