Failure of weak-type endpoint restriction estimates for quadratic manifolds

Abstract

A paper of Beckner, Carbery, Semmes, and Soria proved that the Fourier extension operator associated to the sphere cannot be weak-type bounded at the restriction endpoint $q = 2d/(d-1)$. We generalize their approach to prove that the extension operator associated with any $n$-dimensional quadratic manifold in $\mathbb{R}^d$ cannot be weak-type bounded at $q = 2d/n$. The key step in generalizing the proof of Beckner, Carbery, Semmes, and Soria will be replacing Kakeya sets with what we will call $\mathcal{N}$-Kakeya sets, where $\mathcal{N}$ denotes a closed subset of the Grassmannian $\text{Gr}(d-n,d)$. We define $\mathcal{N}$-Kakeya sets to be subsets of $\mathbb{R}^d$ containing a translate of every $d-n$-plane segment in $\mathcal{N}$. We will prove that if $\mathcal{N}$ is closed and $n$-dimensional, then there exists compact, measure zero $\mathcal{N}$-Kakeya sets, generalizing the same result for standard Kakeya sets.