Absolutely Continuous Embeddings of Rearrangement-Invariant Spaces

Compactness of embeddings between rearrangement invariant spaces is closely related to absolute continuity of these embeddings. We study absolutely continuous embeddings between rearrangement invariant spaces. In particular it is shown that an absolutely continuous embedding is never optimal. We give sufficient (and under additional hypotheses necessary) conditions for absolute continuity of these embeddings. We also provide quantitative estimates of absolutely continuous embeddings.