Reverse triangle inequalities for Riesz potentials and connections with polarization (Q2260371)

Given a compact set \(E\subset \mathbb{C}\) and continuous functions \(f_{j}:E\rightarrow \mathbb{R}\), where \(j=1,\dots,m\), it is clear that \(\sum \sup_{E}f_{j}\geq \sup_{E}\sum f_{j}\). This paper is concerned with ``reverse triangle inequalities'' of the form \(\sum \sup_{E}f_{j}\leq C+\sup_{E}\sum f_{j}\) for particular classes of functions \(f_{j}\). The motivation originates from studies of inequalities for supremum norms of products of polynomials: by taking logarithms these can be deduced from reverse triangle inequalities for logarithmic potentials. The present paper establishes analogous inequalities for Riesz potentials. This is a non-trivial generalization, and has connections with recent work on polarization inequalities. The main tool concerns the farthest point distance function of a compact set \(E\subset \mathbb{R}^{N}\), defined by \(d_{E}(x)=\sup_{y\in E}|x-y|\). It is shown that, if \(0<\alpha \leq 2\), where \(\alpha \neq N\), then there is a unique probability measure \(\sigma _{\alpha }\) such that \(d_{E}^{\alpha-N}(x)=\int |x-y|^{\alpha -N}d\sigma _{\alpha }(y)\).