Partial balayage on Riemannian manifolds (Q1782004)

Classical balayage involves sweeping out a measure to the boundary of a predefined domain in Euclidean space in such a way that the potentials of the initial and final measures agree outside the domain. In partial balayage the measure is instead only partly swept out to achieve a predefined density, and the extent of the set to which it is swept is not specified in advance. This technique has applications to Laplacian growth problems, quadrature domains, inverse problems in potential theory, and several other areas. The purpose of this substantial paper is to generalize this theory to the setting of Riemannian manifolds, especially compact manifolds. Partial balayage is initially discussed in terms of energy minimization, and then later in terms of an obstacle problem. A specific result obtained by the authors in two dimensions is that harmonic balls, defined in terms of the mean value property of harmonic functions, are the same as geodesic balls if and only if the Gaussian curvature of the manifold is constant.