New approach to the affine Pólya-Szegö principle and the stability version of the affine Sobolev inequality (Q317347)

The main aim of the paper is to give a new proof for the affine Pólya-Szegö-type principle. The proof is based on the general \(L_p\) Busemann-Petty centroid inequality. A Brothers-Ziemer-type result for the general affine Pólya-Szegö principle is also established. For \(p\geq 1\) and \(n\geq 2\), let \(W^{1,p}(\mathbb{R}^n)\) denote the space of real-valued \(L^p\) functions on \(\mathbb{R}^n\) with weak \(L^p\) partial derivatives. Let \(|\cdot |\) and \(B_2^n\) denote the standard Euclidean norm on \(\mathbb{R}^n\) and its unit ball, respectively, with \(w_n:=V(B_2^n)\). For \(f\in W^{1,p}(\mathbb{R}^n)\), we set \[ || \nabla f||_p = \left( \int_{\mathbb{R}^n} |\nabla f(x)|^p dx \right)^{1/p}. \] A general \(L_p\) affine energy is defined for \(f\in W^{1,p}(\mathbb{R}^n)\) by \[ {\mathcal E}_{\lambda,p}(f):= c_{n,p}\left( \int_{S^{n-1}} \left( \int_{\mathbb{R}^n}((1-\lambda)(D_uf(x))^p_+ +\lambda (D_uf(x))^p_- )dx \right)^{-n/p} du\right)^{-1/n}, \] where \(\lambda \in [0,1]\), \(c_{n,p}=(nw_n)^{1/n}(nw_nw_{p-1}/w_{n+p-2})^{1/p}\), \(D_uf\) is the directional derivative of \(f\) in the direction \(u\), and \((D_uf)_+=\max \{ D_uf, 0 \}\) and \((D_uf)_-=\max \{ -D_uf, 0 \}\). Let \(\mathrm{BV}(\mathbb{R}^n)\) denote the space of functions of bounded variation on \(\mathbb{R}^n\). For each \(f \in \mathrm{BV}(\mathbb{R}^n)\), its \(L_1\) affine energy is defined as follows \[ {\mathcal E}_1(f)=\frac{c_{n,1}}{2} \left( \int_{S^{n-1}} \left( \int_{\mathbb{R}^n} |\langle u,\sigma_f(x)\rangle | \, d(|Df|)(x) \right)^{-n } du \right)^{-1/n}, \] where \(|Df|\) is the total variation of \(Df\) and \(\sigma_f\) is the Radon-Nikodym derivative of \(Df\) with respect to \(|Df|\). Also, we define \(\delta_a(f)\) as follows \[ \delta_a(f) =\frac{{\mathcal E}_1(f)}{nw_n^{1/n}||f||_{n'}}-1, \] where \(n'=n/(n-1)\). The following two theorems are the main results. Theorem 1.1. If \(p>1\) and \(f\in W^{1,p}(\mathbb{R}^n)\), then \[ {\mathcal E}_{\lambda,p}(f) \geq {\mathcal E}_{\lambda,p}(f^{\star}), \] where \(f^{\star}\) is the symmetric rearrangement of \(f\). Moreover, if \(f\) is a nonnegative function such that \[ V(\{ x \, : \, |\nabla f^{\star}(x) |=0\} \cap \{ x \, : \, 0<f^{\star}(x) < \text{ess \, \, sup } f\})=0, \] then equality holds if and only if there exists \(x_0 \in \mathbb{R}^n\) such that \(f(x)=f^E(x+x_0)\) a.e. on \(\mathbb{R}^n\), here \(E\) is an origin-centered ellipsoid. Using the above-mentioned theorem, some general Sobolev type inequalities are proved. Also, the classification of their extremal functions is given. The sharp affine Sobolev inequality for functions on \(\mathrm{BV}(\mathbb{R}^n)\) states that for \(f\in \mathrm{BV}(\mathbb{R}^n)\) we get \[ {\mathcal E}_1(f) \geq nw_n^{1/n}||f||_{n'}. \qquad \qquad \qquad (1) \] The next theorem establishes a stability estimate for inequality (1). Theorem 1.2. For \(n \geq 2\), there exists a positive constant \(\alpha(n)\) depending only on \(n\) such that \[ d_{a}(f, {\mathcal M}) \leq \alpha(n) \delta_a(f)^{1/cn}, \] for any \(f \in \mathrm{BV}(\mathbb{R}^n)\) with \(c=1680\), where \[ {\mathcal M}:= \{ g_{a,x_0,\psi,r}=a \chi_{x_0+ar\psi(B_2^n)} \, : \, a\not= 0, r>0, x_0 \in \mathbb{R}^n, \psi \in \mathrm{SL}_n\}, \] here \(\mathrm{SL}_n\) denotes the set of \(n \times n\) volume preserving linear transformations, \(d_{a}(f, {\mathcal M})\) is the distance of \(f\) from \({\mathcal M}\) defined by \[ d_{a}(f, {\mathcal M}) =\inf \left\{ \frac{||f-g_{a,x_0,\psi,r} ||_{n'}^{n'}}{||f||_{n'}^{n'}} \, : \, g_{a,x_0,\psi,r} \in {\mathcal M}, ||f||_{n'}=||g_{a,x_0,\psi,r}||_{n'} \right\} \quad\text{if} \quad f\not=0. \]