Unique solvability of the integral equation for harmonic simple layer potential on the boundary of a domain with a peak (Q735610)

Let \(\Omega \) be a bounded simply connected domain in \(\mathbb{R}^{n}\) \((n>2)\) with boundary \(\Gamma \). Under suitable hypotheses on the smoothness of \(\Gamma \), various authors have investigated the problem of finding the solution to the Dirichlet problem on \(\Omega \) (for the Laplace equation) in the form of a simple layer potential \(V\rho \) with density \(\rho \). The present paper considers what happens when \(\Gamma \) has an isolated cusp. Let \(Tr(\Gamma )\) denote the space of traces on \(\Gamma \) of functions with finite Dirichlet integral over \(\mathbb{R}^{n}\). It is shown that the mapping \(C(\Gamma )\ni \rho \mapsto V\rho \in Tr(\Gamma )\) admits a unique extension to an isomorphism between the dual space \(Tr(\Gamma )^{\ast }\) and \(Tr(\Gamma )\). This is then used to characterize solvability of the equation \(V\rho =f\) in terms of the boundary data \(f\) and the function describing the cusp.