Lateral Weak Stieltjes Derivatives: A Global Characterization of Stieltjes--Sobolev Spaces

Abstract

Weak formulations for Stieltjes differential equations must retain the directional information carried by atoms of the driving measure. We derive a lateral integration-by-parts identity in which the posterior trace of the test function is forced by the atomic product rule. The resulting dual formulation gives an exact global characterization of integral Stieltjes--Sobolev spaces for the full exponent range from one to infinity and reconstructs the unique strong representative from its traced weak state. We prove that the associated traced weak operator is closed, establish Poincar\'e--Stieltjes estimates, and \rev{characterize Stieltjes absolute continuity inside bounded variation through a canonical derivative measure whose restriction to the open interval is the classical distributional derivative}. The framework is then applied to finite-dimensional nonlinear measure-driven systems, yielding equivalence of weak, integral, and measure formulations, existence and uniqueness under integrable Lipschitz assumptions, compactness-based existence, and intrinsic reset laws. Cubic and logistic models illustrate the simultaneous encoding of continuous evolution and instantaneous interventions.