Compactness of the Neumann operator for hyperconvex domains with non-smooth \(B\)-regular boundary (Q1359524)

Let \(\Omega\) be a bounded domain in \(\mathbb{C}^n\). We say that \(b\Omega\) satisfies property \((B)\) if there exists a continuous function \(\rho\) defined in a neighborhood \(U\) of \(b\Omega\) such that \(\Omega= \{z\in U\mid \rho (z<0\}\) and \(dd^c \rho\geq dd^c |z |^2\) on \(U\cap \Omega\) in the sense of distributions. If \(\Omega\) has \(C^\infty\) boundary, the property \((B)\) defined before for \(b\Omega\) is equivalent to the property \((P)\) which was introduced by Catlin, who proved the compactness of the Neumann operator in this case. If \(\Omega\) is strictly pseudoconvex with smooth boundary the compactness of the Neumann operator was proved by J. J. Kohn, who raised the problem for strictly pseudoconvex domains with piece-wise smooth boundaries. We prove that the Neumann operator on domains with boundary satisfying property \((B)\) is compact. In particular, the property \((B)\) is satisfied for strictly pseudoconvex domains with arbitrary boundary and pseudoconvex Reinhardt domains and convex domains whose boundaries contain no analytic set of positive dimension. By this, we answer also to a problem raised by Salinas, Sheu and Upmeier who asked the question for the Reinhardt domains in \(\mathbb{C}^2\). The principal difficulty is that the density of smooth forms in the graph norm \(|f|^2+ |\overline \partial f|^2 +|\overline \partial^* f|^2\) in \(\text{Dom} \overline \partial \cap\text{Dom} \overline \partial^* \), which is always true for pseudoconvex domains with smooth boundaries, fails to be true in the case of piecewise smooth boundaries.