A phase-space approach to weighted Fourier extension inequalities

The purpose of this paper is to expose and investigate natural phase-space formulations of two longstanding problems in the restriction theory of the Fourier transform. These problems, often referred to as the Stein and Mizohata--Takeuchi conjectures, assert that Fourier extension operators associated with rather general (codimension 1) submanifolds of euclidean space, may be effectively controlled by the classical X-ray transform via weighted L² inequalities. Our phase-space formulations, which expose close connections with a conjecture of Flandrin from time-frequency analysis, rest on the identification of an explicit "geometric" Wigner transform associated with an arbitrary (smooth strictly convex) submanifold S of ℝ^n. Our main results are certain natural "Sobolev variants" of the Stein and Mizohata--Takeuchi conjectures, and involve estimating the Sobolev norms of such Wigner transforms by geometric forms of classical bilinear fractional integral operators. Our broad geometric framework allows us to explore the role of the curvature of the submanifold in these problems, and in particular we obtain bounds that are independent of any lower bound on the curvature; a feature that is uncommon in the wider restriction theory of the Fourier transform. Finally, we provide a further illustration of the effectiveness of our Sobolev norm approach by establishing a form of Flandrin's conjecture in the plane with an ε-loss. While our perspective comes primarily from euclidean harmonic analysis, the general procedure used for constructing phase-space representations of extension operators is well-known in optics.