Second order variation reducing properties of rearrangements (Q2707666)

One of the classical versions of the Pólya-Szegő principle states that if \(u\) belongs to a~Sobolev space \(W^{1,p}(0,a)\), then also the non-increasing rearrangement \(u^*\) of \(u\) belongs to \(W^{1,p}(0,a)\) and the inequality \(\|(u^*)'\|_{L^p(0,a)} \leq \|u'\|_{L^p(0,a)}\) is satisfied. It is well known that this result cannot be extended to the case of higher order derivatives simply because the second order derivative of a~rearrangement of a~function need not exist, not even when the function itself is very smooth. On the other hand it would be very desirable to find a suitable replacement as this would improve very much our knowledge of Sobolev-type embeddings. The author pursues a~very promising approach by considering derivatives in the sense of measures and therefore working in the spaces of bounded variation type rather than Sobolev type. One of the main results states that when \(u\in BV^2(0,a)\) (the space of functions whose second order distributional derivative \(D^2u\) is a~(signed) measure with finite total variation over \((0,a)\)), then also \(u^*\in BV^2(0,a)\) and the total variation of \(D^2u^*\) over \((0,a)\) does not exceed that of \(D^2u\). Extensions to more general Dirichlet type functionals are discussed and analogous results involving symmetric rearrangement are proved.NEWLINENEWLINEFor the entire collection see [Zbl 0933.00035].