In this paper we continue to advance the theory regarding the Riesz fractional gradient in the calculus of variations and fractional partial differential equations begun in an earlier work of the same name. In particular we here establish an L1 Hardy inequality, obtain further regularity results for solutions of certain fractional PDE, demonstrate the existence of minimizers for integral functionals of the fractional gradient with non-linear dependence in the field, and also establish the existence of solutions to corresponding Euler-Lagrange equations obtained as conditions of minimality. In addition we pose a number of open problems, the answers to which would fill in some gaps in the theory as well as to establish connections with more classical areas of study, including interpolation and the theory of Dirichlet forms.

In this paper we prove several formulae that enable one to capture the singular portion of the measure derivative of a function of bounded variation as a limit of non-local functionals. One special case shows that rescalings of the fractional Laplacian of a function $u \in SBV$ converge strictly to the singular portion of $Du$.

In this paper we connect Calderón and Zygmund’s notion of Lp-differentiability (Calderón and Zygmund, Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 46:1385–1389, 1960) with some recent characterizations of Sobolev spaces via the asymptotics of non-local functionals due to Bourgain, Brezis, and Mironescu (Optimal Control and Partial Differential Equations, pp. 439–455, 2001). We show how the results of the former can be generalized to the setting of the latter, while the latter results can be strengthened in the spirit of the former. As a consequence of these results we give several new characterizations of Sobolev spaces, a novel condition for whether a function of bounded variation is in the Sobolev space W1,1, and complete the proof of a characterization of the Sobolev spaces recently claimed in (Leoni and Spector, J Funct Anal 261:2926–2958, 2011; Leoni and Spector, J Funct Anal 266:1106–1114, 2014).

In this paper we establish new $L^1$-type estimates for the classical Riesz potentials of order $\alpha \in (0, N)$: \[ \|I_\alpha u\|_{L^{N/(N-\alpha)}(\mathbb{R}^N)} \leq C \|Ru\|_{L^1(\mathbb{R}^N;\mathbb{R}^N)}. \] This sharpens the result of Stein and Weiss on the mapping properties of Riesz potentials on the real Hardy space $\mathcal{H}^1(\mathbb{R}^N)$ and provides a new family of $L^1$-Sobolev inequalities for the Riesz fractional gradient.

In this work we introduce a formulation for a non-local Hessian that combines the ideas of higher-order and non-local regularization for image restoration, extending the idea of non-local gradients to higher-order derivatives. By carefully choosing the weights, the model allows to improve on the current state of the art higher-order method, Total Generalized Variation, with respect to overall quality and particularly close to jumps in the data. In the spirit of recent work by Brezis et al., our formulation also has analytic implications: for a suitable choice of weights, it can be shown to converge to classical second-order regularizers, and in fact allows a novel characterization of higher-order Sobolev and BV spaces.