Geometric-type Sobolev inequalities and applications to the regularity of minimizers (Q1932408)

The authors prove the following geometric-type Sobolev and Morrey's inequalities. Let \(\Omega\) be a smooth bounded domain of \(\mathbb{R}^{n}\) with \(n\geq2\). Then for every \(p\geq1\) and \(r\in\{0\}\cup[1,\infty)\) there exists a constant \(C=C(n,p,r)>0\) such that the following inequalities hold for all functions \(u\in C_{0}^{\infty}(\Omega)\) (i.e.\(,\) \(u\in C^{\infty }(\Omega)\) and \(u=0\) on \(\partial\Omega)\): (a) \(\left\| u\right\| _{L^{\infty}(\Omega)}\leq C\left| \Omega\right| ^{\frac{p(1+r)-n}{np} }\left\| \left| H_{u}\right| ^{r}\left| \nabla u\right| \right\| _{L^{p}(\Omega\cap\left\{ \left| \nabla u\right| >0\right\} )}\) if \(1+r\leq n<p(1+r)\); (b) \(\left\| u\right\| _{L^{p_{r}^{\ast}}(\Omega)}\leq C\left\| \left| H_{u}\right| ^{r}\left| \nabla u\right| \right\| _{L^{p}(\Omega\cap\left\{ \left| \nabla u\right| >0\right\} )}\) if \(n>p(1+r)\). The case where \(p>1\) and \(n=p(1+r)\) is also considered. Here \(H_{u}=-\frac{1}{n-1} \text{div}\left( \frac{\nabla u}{\left| \nabla u\right| }\right) \) denotes the mean curvature of the level sets of \(\left| u\right| ,\) and the critical exponent \(p_{r}^{\ast}\) is defined by \(1/p_{r}^{\ast}=1/p-(1+r)/n\). This extends previous work due to Trudinger in the case of mean convex functions. As an application new \(L^{q}\) and \(W^{1,q}\) a priori estimates for local minimizers (and more generally, for semi-stable solutions) of reaction-diffusion problems are derived. These estimates lead to an \(L^{2n/(n-4)}(\Omega)\) bound for the extremal solution of \(-\Delta u=\lambda f(u)\) when \(n\geq5\) and the domain is convex. As the authors noticed, the extremal solutions are known to be bounded in convex domains if \(n\leq4,\) and their boundedness is expected (but still unknown) for \(n\leq9.\)