Monotonicity theorems for Laplace Beltrami operator on Riemannian manifolds (Q616883)

The authors prove a Riemannian analogue of the monotonicity theorem of Caffarelli-Jerison-Kenig (which was proved in Euclidean space). Namely, for two continuous functions \( u_1 , u_2 \) with Laplacian bounded below by \(-1\) on a geodesic ball \( B_1 (p) \) of radius 1 and whose product vanishes identically, they obtain an estimate on \[ \phi (r) := r^{-4} \prod_{i=1}^2 \big\| |\nabla_g u_i| d (.,p)^{1- n/2} \big\|_{L^2 (B_{r}(p))}^2 \] of the form \[ \phi (r) \leq C \big( 1 +\|u_1\|_{L^2 (B_{\delta}(p))}^2 +\|u_2\|_{L^2 (B_{\delta}(p))}^2 \big)^2 \] for \( 0 < 2 r < \delta \), with a constant depending on an upper bound of the first covariant derivatives of the curvature tensor on \( B_1 (p)\). Here, \(n\) denotes the dimension of the manifold, \(d (.,p) \) is the geodesic distance to \(p\) and \( B_r (p)\) is the geodesic ball of radius \(r\) centered at \(p\). An application is given to the Lipschitz regularity of weak solutions to two-phase free boundary problems on Riemannian manifolds.