Endpoint Bounds for the Quartile Operator

It is a result by Lacey and Thiele (Ann. of Math. (2) 146(3):693–724, 1997; ibid. 149(2):475–496, 1999) that the bilinear Hilbert transform maps $L^{p_{1}}(\mathbb{R}) \times L^{p_{2}}(\mathbb{R}) $ into $L^{p_{3}}(\mathbb{R})$ whenever (p ₁,p ₂,p ₃) is a Hölder tuple with p ₁,p ₂>1 and $p_{3}>\frac{2}{3}$ . We study the behavior of the quartile operator, which is the Walsh model for the bilinear Hilbert transform, when $p_{3}=\frac{2}{3}$ . We show that the quartile operator maps $L^{p_{1}}(\mathbb{R}) \times L^{p_{2}}(\mathbb{R}) $ into $L^{\frac{2}{3},\infty}(\mathbb{R})$ when p ₁,p ₂>1 and one component is restricted to subindicator functions. As a corollary, we derive that the quartile operator maps $L^{p_{1}}(\mathbb{R}) \times L^{p_{2},\frac{2}{3}}(\mathbb{R}) $ into $L^{\frac{2}{3},\infty}(\mathbb{R})$ . We also provide weak type estimates and boundedness on Orlicz-Lorentz spaces near p ₁=1,p ₂=2 which improve, in the Walsh case, the results of Bilyk and Grafakos (J. Geom. Anal. 16 (4):563–584, 2006) and Carro et al. (J. Math. Anal. Appl. 357(2):479–497, 2009). Our main tool is the multi-frequency Calderón-Zygmund decomposition from (Nazarov et al. in Math. Res. Lett. 17(3):529–545, 2010).