Potential Spaces on Lie Groups

In this paper we discuss function spaces on a general noncompact Lie group, namely the scales of Triebel–Lizorkin and Besov spaces, defined in terms of a sub-Laplacian with drift. The sub-Laplacian is written as the (negative) sum of squares of a collection of left-invariant vector fields satisfying Hörmander’s condition. These spaces were recently introduced by the authors. In this paper we prove a norm characterization in terms of finite differences, the density of test functions, and related isomorphism properties.