Surface integrals and harmonic functions (Q2498217)

Let \(u\) be a positive harmonic function on the open unit ball in \(\mathbb{R} ^{n}\) and let \(A_{\delta }\) denote the annulus \(\{1-\delta <\left| x\right| <1\}\). The ``inferior mean'' \( IM(u)\) is defined to be \(\lim_{\delta \rightarrow 0}\inf_{\Gamma \subset A_{\delta }}\int_{\Gamma }u\), where the infimum is over all piecewise \(C^{1}\) -smooth hypersurfaces \(A_{\delta }\) separating the two boundary spheres of \( A_{\delta }\), and the integral is with respect to surface area measure. Inspired by earlier unpublished work of M. Heins and of J. M. Wu, the author shows that \(M_{n}\left\| \mu \right\| \leq IM(u)\leq \left\| \mu \right\| \), where \(\mu \) is the measure associated with \(u\) in the Riesz-Herglotz representation, and \(M_{n}\) is an explicit dimensional constant. The upper bound is realised when \(\mu \) is absolutely continuous with respect to surface area measure on the unit sphere, and the lower bound is realised when \(\mu \) is a Dirac measure.