A minimum principle for potentials with application to Chebyshev constants (Q2014235)

A compact set \(A\subset \mathbb{R}^{p}\) is called \(d\)-regular (\( 0 < d \leq p \)) if the \(d\)-dimensional Hausdorff measure of \(B(y,r)\cap A\) is comparable to \(r^{d}\) whenever \( y \in A\) and \( 0 < r < \mathrm{diam}(A)\). This paper is concerned with Riesz-like potentials of the form \(U_{f}^{\mu }(y)=\int_{A}f(\left| x-y\right| )d\mu (x)\), where \(f:(0,\infty )\rightarrow (0,\infty )\) is continuous and strictly decreasing, and the function \(t\longmapsto t^{d-\varepsilon }f(t)\) is strictly increasing on \([0,t_{\varepsilon }]\) for some \(\varepsilon \in (0,d)\) and \(t_{\varepsilon }>0\). Let \(P_{f}(\mu )=\inf_{A}U_{f}^{\mu }\). The authors establish a minimum principle for such potentials and use it to show that, if \((\nu _{N})\) is a sequence of measures on \(A\) that is weak* convergent to a measure \(\nu \), then \(P_{f}(\nu _{N})\rightarrow P_{f}(\nu )\).