Dirichlet integrals and Steiner asymmetry (Q2370808)

The aim of this paper is to measure the asymmetry of a Sobolev function \(u\). The asymmetry of \(u\) is understood as the measure of the integral distance between \(u\) and its Steiner symmetral \(u^s\). In the introduction, the authors summarize the historical background of this problem and show that the Pólya-Szegő deficit \(D_p(u)=\int_{\Omega}| \Delta u| ^p\,dx-\int_{\Omega}| \Delta u^s| ^p\,dx\) is not enough to estimate the asymmetry. After analysing some previous work, they conjecture that it could be possible to solve this problem considering not only the Pólya-Szegő deficit but also the \(n\)-dimensional (outer) Lebesgue measure of the set \(\{ (x',y) \in \Omega: \Delta_yu^s(x',y)=0, u^s(x',y)<S(x') \}\), where \(\Omega\) is an open subset of the \(n\)-dimensional Euclidean space and \(S(x')=\text{ess\,sup}\{u(x',y): y\in \Omega_x' \}\) for \(x'\in\pi(\Omega)\). As the authors point out, not even this is true, but the counterexample that they show sheds light on this matter and opens the way to prove the main result in the paper: they provide an estimate for the distance in \(L^1(\Omega)\) between \(u\) and \(u^s\) in terms of the Pólya-Szegő deficit and of a distribution function \(M_{u^s}:[0, \infty)\rightarrow[0, L^n(\Omega))\) of \(| \Delta_yu^s| \), which is defined as \[ M_{u^s}(\sigma)=L^n(\{ (x',y) \in \Omega: \Delta_yu^s(x',y)\leq \sigma, u^s(x',y)<S(x') \}) \] for \(\sigma\geq 0\). Moreover, they also show that such an estimate approaches 0 as \(D_p(u)\) goes to zero if and only if \(M_{u^s}(0)=0\).