Sharp estimates for the size of balls in the complement of a hypersurface (Q2574975): Difference between revisions

The authors obtain some results on upper estimates for the radii of balls in the complements to hypersurfaces in Euclidean spaces assuming that these hypersurfaces enjoy the Jordan-Brouwer property which means that the complement to a hypersurface is the union of two disjoint nonempty open sets for which the hypersurface is the common boundary. In particular, they prove that if an \(n\)-dimensional hypersurface \(M\) meets at least one of the following two conditions for some positive constant \(\lambda\): 1) \(| \sigma| ^2 \geq \frac{n}{\lambda^2}\) and \(| h| > \frac{n-2}{n\lambda}\), where \(| \sigma| ^2 \) is the squared length of the second fundamental form and \(h\) is the mean curvature; 2) for some \(k=1,\dots,n\) the \(k\)-mean curvature \(H_k\) satisfies the inequality \(| H_k| \geq {1}/{\lambda^k}\) and, moreover, if \(k \geq 2\) then there is a point of the hypersurface at which all principal curvatures do not change sign, then there is a component of the complement to \(M\) such that any ball contained in it has radius less than \(\lambda\) unless the hypersurface is a sphere of radius \(\lambda\). These theorems generalize the previous statements known before for compact hypersurfaces. The same technique allows also to prove that \(\inf | h| =0\) for the graph of a function \(f: {\mathbb R}^n \to {\mathbb R}\) and, assuming that the mean curvature does not change sign, \(\inf | \sigma| \) also vanishes.