Dynamical approach to an overdetermined problem in potential theory (Q304885)

This paper concerns the overdetermined problem \(-\Delta u=\mu \) on \(\Omega \), \(u=0\) and \(-\partial u/\partial n=1\) on \(\partial \Omega \), where \(\mu \) is a given compactly supported positive measure on \(\mathbb{R}^{N}\). It is known that there exists a bounded domain \(\Omega \) which admits a solution \(u\) to this problem. However, there may exist more than one such domain \(\Omega \), even when \(\mu \) is the sum of two Dirac measures. This paper establishes the uniqueness of \(\Omega \) when \(\mu \) is a small perturbation of a Dirac measure. This is done by establishing the existence of a continuous family of domains \(\Omega (t)\) for which a parametrized overdetermined problem can be solved.