A note on plurisubharmonic defining functions in \(\mathbb{C}^2\) (Q2458866): Difference between revisions

The authors study the behaviour of defining functions close to the boundary for smoothly bounded domains \(\Omega\subset\mathbb C ^2 \) such that there exists a smooth defining function which is plurisubharmonic along the boundary. For those domains, given \(\varepsilon , K >0\) one can find a neighbourhood of the boundary \(V\) and other defining functions \(r, \rho \) so that their Hessians satisfy \[ H_r (\xi ,\xi )(z)\geq \varepsilon r(z)| \xi | ^2 +K| \langle \partial r(z), \xi \rangle | ^2, \quad z\in V\cap\overline{\Omega }, \;\xi\in\mathbb C ^2 , \] and \[ H_{\rho } (\xi ,\xi )(z)\geq -\varepsilon \rho(z)| \xi | ^2 +K| \langle \partial \rho (z), \xi \rangle | ^2, \quad z\in V\setminus \Omega, \;\xi\in\mathbb C ^2. \] One consequence of that is that the Diederich-Fornaess exponent for such domains can be chosen arbitrarily close to \(1\) (which means that for each \(a<1\) there exists a smooth defining function \(r\) such that \(-(-r)^a \) is strictly plurisubharmonic). Another corollary says that under the same hypothesis on \(\Omega\) for any \(a\in (0,1), b>1\) there exist smooth defining functions \(r,\rho \) such that \(-(-r)^a \) is strictly plurisubharmonic in \(\Omega\) and for some neighbourhood of the boundary \(V\), \(-(-\rho )^b \) is strictly plurisubharmonic in \(V\setminus\overline{\Omega } .\) From this it follows that \(\overline{\Omega } \) has a Stein neighbourhood basis.