Embeddings of weighted Sobolev spaces and generalized Caffarelli-Kohn-Nirenberg inequalities

We characterize all the real numbers a,b,c and 1<= p,q,r<infty such that the weighted Sobolev space W_{a,b}^(q,p)(R^N{0}) with power weights |x|^a and |x|^b is continuously embedded into L^{r}(R^N;|x|^cdx). Furthermore, we show that this embedding is (almost) always characterized by a multiplicative norm inequality. When a,b,c>-N and attention is confined to smooth functions with compact support, these inequalities coincide with the Caffarelli-Kohn-Nirenberg inequalities. Variants for radially symmetric functions, or when r<=min{p,q}, are also obtained along the way.