In this paper, we establish suitable characterisations for a pair of functions $(W(x),H(x))$ on a bounded, connected domain $\Omega \subset \mathbb{R}^n$ in order to have the following Hardy inequality:

\begin{equation*}\int_{\Omega} W(x) |\nabla u|_A^2 dx \geq \int_{\Omega} |\nabla d|^2_AH(x)|u|^2 dx, \,\,\, u \in C^{1}_0(\Omega),\end{equation*}

where d(x) is a suitable quasi-norm (gauge), $|\xi|^2_A = \langle A(x)\xi, \xi \rangle$ for $\xi \in \mathbb{R}^n$ and A(x) is an n × n symmetric, uniformly positive definite matrix defined on a bounded domain $\Omega \subset \mathbb{R}^n$. We also give its Lp analogue. As a consequence, we present examples for a standard Laplacian on $\mathbb{R}^n$, Baouendi–Grushin operator, and sub-Laplacians on the Heisenberg group, the Engel group and the Cartan group. Those kind of characterisations for a pair of functions $(W(x),H(x))$ are obtained also for the Rellich inequality. These results answer the open problems of Ghoussoub-Moradifam [16].

In this paper we obtain some improved $L^p$ -Hardy and $L^p$ -Rellich inequalities on bounded domains of Riemannian manifolds. For Cartan–Hadamard manifolds we prove the inequalities with sharp constants and with weights being hyperbolic functions of the Riemannian distance.

In this paper, we prove several new Hardy type inequalities (such as the weighted Hardy inequality, weighted Rellich inequality, critical Hardy inequality and critical Rellich inequality) related to the radial derivation (i.e., the derivation along the geodesic curves) on the Cartan–Hadamard manifolds. By Gauss lemma, our new Hardy inequalities are stronger than the classical ones. We also establish the improvements of these inequalities in terms of sectional curvature of the underlying manifolds which illustrate the effect of curvature to these inequalities. Furthermore, we obtain some improvements of Hardy and Rellich inequalities on the hyperbolic space ℍn. Especially, we show that our new Rellich inequalities are indeed stronger than the classical ones on the hyperbolic space ℍn.

We establish existence of weighted Hardy and Rellich inequalities on the spaces $L_{p}(\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FA})$, where $\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FA}=\mathbf{R}^{d}\backslash K$ with $K$ a closed convex subset of $\mathbf{R}^{d}$. Let $\unicode[STIX]{x1D6E4}=\unicode[STIX]{x2202}\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FA}$ denote the boundary of $\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FA}$ and $d_{\unicode[STIX]{x1D6E4}}$ the Euclidean distance to $\unicode[STIX]{x1D6E4}$. We consider weighting functions $c_{\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FA}}=c\circ d_{\unicode[STIX]{x1D6E4}}$ with $c(s)=s^{\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FF}}(1+s)^{\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FF}^{\prime }-\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FF}}$ and $\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FF},\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FF}^{\prime }\geq 0$. Then the Hardy inequalities take the form

$$\begin{eqnarray}\int _{\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FA}}c_{\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FA}}|\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FB}\unicode[STIX]{x1D711}|^{p}\geq b_{p}\int _{\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FA}}c_{\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FA}}\,d_{\unicode[STIX]{x1D6E4}}^{-p}|\unicode[STIX]{x1D711}|^{p}\end{eqnarray}$$

$$\begin{eqnarray}\int _{\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FA}}|H\unicode[STIX]{x1D711}|^{p}\geq d_{p}\int _{\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FA}}|c_{\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FA}}\,d_{\unicode[STIX]{x1D6E4}}^{-2}\unicode[STIX]{x1D711}|^{p}\end{eqnarray}$$

$H=-\text{div}(c_{\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FA}}\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FB})$

$b_{p},d_{p}$

$\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FF},\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FF}^{\prime }\geq 0$