Estimates on elliptic equations that hold only where the gradient is large (Q294198)

The authors prove Hölder estimates and a Harnack inequality for a framework involving some extremal operators, which coincide with Pucci operators with an additional first order term when the gradient is large, while no information is required in the regions where the gradient is small. Such framework includes viscosity solutions of some uniformly elliptic equations, with \(L^{\infty}\) coefficient of the first order term and which are satisfied only where the gradient of the solution is large. The results follow from a so-called \(L^\varepsilon\) estimate, which is obtained without the pointwise Aleksandrov-Bakelman-Pucci estimate, as it is classically done in the globally uniformly elliptic case. In this work, instead, the authors obtain it by estimating directly the measure of the superlevel set of supersolutions through the sliding of some cusps functions from below. In particular, the proof of the \(L^\varepsilon\) lemma covers a gap in the analogue result of the first author [J. Differential Equations 250, 1553--1574 (2011; Zbl 1205.35124)].