Infimal Convolutions and Lipschitzian Properties of Subdifferentials for Prox-Regular Functions in Hilbert Spaces

We study infimal convolutions of extended-real-valued functions in Hilbert spaces paying a special attention to the rather broad and remarkable class of prox-regular functions. Such functions have been well recognized as highly important in many aspects of variational analysis and its applications in both finite-dimensional and infinite-dimensional settings. Based on advanced variational techniques, we discover some new subdifferential properties of infimal convolutions and apply them to the study of Lipschitzian behavior of subdifferentials for prox-regular functions in Hilbert spaces. It is shown, in particular, that the fulfillment of a natural Lipschitz-like property for (set-valued) subdifferentials of prox-regular functions forces such functions, under weak assumptions, actually to be locally smooth with single-valued subdifferentials reduced to Lipschitz continuous gradient mappings.