Bilinear maximal functions associated with degenerate surfaces

We study $L^{p}\times L^{q}\rightarrow L^{r}$-boundedness of (sub)bilinear maximal functions associated with degenerate hypersurfaces. First, we obtain the maximal bound on the sharp range of exponents $p,q,r$ (except some border line cases) for the bilinear maximal functions given by the model surface $\big\{(y,z)\in\mathbb{R}^{n}\times \mathbb{R}^{n}:|y|^{l_{1}}+|z|^{l_{2}}=1\big\}$, $(l_{1},l_{2})\in [1,\infty)^2$, $n\ge 2$. Our result manifests that nonvanishing Gaussian curvature is not good enough, in contrast with $L^p$-boundedness of the (sub)linear maximal operator associated to hypersurfaces, to characterize the best possible maximal boundedness. Secondly, we consider the bilinear maximal function associated to the finite type curve in $\mathbb R^2$ and obtain a complete characterization of the maximal bound. We also prove multilinear generalizations of the aforementioned results.