Geometric stability of the Coulomb energy (Q889749)

Let \[ \mathcal E (A)=\int_A \int_A |x-y|^{-1} dx dy \] denote the Coulomb energy over \(A \subset \mathbb R^3\) and \(A^*\) the ball of the same volume. The author proves that there exists a positive constant \(c\) such that \[ \frac{\mathcal E (A^*) -\mathcal E (A)}{\mathcal E (A^*)} \geq c \left( \inf_{\tau}\frac{\operatorname{Vol}((\tau A) \Delta A^*)}{2 \operatorname{Vol}(A)} \right)^2 \] where \(\tau\) runs over all translations and \(\Delta\) denotes the symmetric difference.