We review some basic facts about the λ-cosine transforms with odd kernel on the unit sphere S n−1 in R n . These transforms are represented by the spherical fractional integrals arising as a result of evaluation of the Fourier transform of homogeneous functions. The related topic is the hemispherical transform which assigns to every finite Borel measure on S n−1 its values for all hemispheres. We revisit the known facts about this transform and obtain new results. In particular, we show that the classical FunkRadon-Helgason inversion method of spherical means is applicable to the hemispherical transform of L p -functions.MSC 2010 : Primary 44A12; Secondary 47G10 Key Words and Phrases: fractional integrals, hemispherical transform, λ-cosine transforms with odd kernel, spherical means
IntroductionThe following analytic families of fractional integrals arise as a result of evaluation of the Fourier transform of homogeneous functions on R n \ {0}. Here S n−1 is the unit sphere in R n , λ is a complex parameter, γ n,λ andγ n,λ are normalizing coefficients which will be specified later, d * σ stands for the normalized surface element on S n−1 . We call these operators the λ-cosine transforms with even and odd kernel, respectively. The term cosine transform is borrowed from integral geometry and reflects the fact that θ · σ is nothing but the cosine of the angle between the unit vectors θ and σ. Operators of this kind occur in different branches of mathematics without naming or under different names. In the following, we often skip the prefix λ, for short.The main concern of the present article is the operator family (1.2). Regarding (1.1), extensive information, including generalizations and applications, can be found in [16,26,36,47,48,49].Our next topic is the hemispherical transform which assigns to every finite Borel measure on S n−1 its values for all hemispheres in S n−1 . This transform is intimately connected withC λ . It was introduced by Funk [13] for n = 3 and studied in [4,20,21,43,16,54]. A similar transform for half-spaces in R n was studied in [23,28,41] in connection with Kolmogorov's problem [27, Problem No. 16]. Unlike the half-space transform, the hemispherical transform is non-injective and its kernel is composed by even measures with the mean value zero. The latter means that our consideration can be focused on odd measures or functions.In the present paper we review basic facts about operatorsC λ and the hemispherical transform. We update our previous proofs given in [43] and obtain new results. In particular, in Section 5.4 we show that the Funk-Radon-Helgason inversion method of spherical means, which plays an important role in the theory of Radon transforms [22,50], is applicable to the hemispherical transform.The paper is organized as follows. In Section 2 we recall some facts from Fractional Calculus and analysis on the sphere. In Section 3 we show how (1.1) and (1.2) arise in the framework of the Fourier analysis on R n and discuss properties of these operators, including action in ...