Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

This talk concerns recent joint work with E. M. Stein on the extension to higher dimension of Calder\'on's andCoifman-McIntosh-Meyer's seminal results about the Cauchy integral for a Lipschitz planar curve (interpreted as the boundary of a Lipschitz domain $D\subset\mathbb C$). From the point of view of complex analysis, a fundamental feature of the 1-dimensional Cauchy kernel:\vskip-1.0em $$H(w, z) = \frac{1}{2\pi i}\frac{dw}{w-z}$$ \smallskip\vskip-0.7em\noindent is that it is holomorphic (that is, analytic) as a function of $z\in D$. In great contrast with the one-dimensional theory, in higher dimension there is no obvious holomorphic analogueof $H(w, z)$. This is because of geometric obstructions (the Levi problem) that in dimension 1 are irrelevant. A good candidate kernel for the higher dimensional setting was first identified by Jean Lerayin the context of a $C^\infty$-smooth, convex domain $D$: while these conditions on $D$ can be relaxed a bit, if the domain is less than $C^2$-smooth (much less Lipschitz!) Leray's construction becomes conceptually problematic.In this talk I will present {\em(a)}, the construction of theCauchy-Leray kernel and {\em(b)}, the $L^p(bD)$-boundedness of the induced singular integral operator under the weakest currently known assumptions on the domain's regularity -- in the case of a planar domain these are akin to Lipschitz boundary, but in our higher-dimensional context the assumptions we make are in fact optimal. The proofs rely in a fundamental way on a suitably adapted version of the so-called \,$T(1)$-theorem technique'' from real harmonic analysis.Time permitting, I will describe applications of this work to complex function theory -- specifically, to the Szeg\H o and Bergman projections (that is, the orthogonal projections of $L^2$ onto, respectively, the Hardy and Bergman spaces of holomorphic functions).