Optimal regularity and nondegeneracy of a free boundary problem related to the fractional Laplacian

DOI10.1007/S00205-013-0619-7MaRDI QIDQ2435003zbMATH OpenOpenAlexFDO

Publication date 3 February 2014

Published in Archive for Rational Mechanics and Analysis (Search for Journal in Brave)

Full work available at URL https://arxiv.org/abs/1101.2601

Fractional Laplacian Free boundary problem Harnack inequality Optimal regularity

A priori estimates in context of PDEs (35B45) Fractional partial differential equations (35R11) Free boundary problems for PDEs (35R35) Existence theories for optimal control problems involving partial differential equations (49J20)

Abstract: We discuss the optimal regularity and nondegeneracy of a free boundary problem related to the fractional Laplacian. This work is related to, but addresses a different problem from, recent work of Caffarelli, Roquejoffre, and Sire. A variant of the boundary Harnack inequality is also proved, where it is no longer required that the function be 0 along the boundary.

Review text

The interesting paper under review deals with local properties near the free boundary for minimizers of the energy functional \[ J(u)={1\over2}\int_{{\mathbb R}^n\times {\mathbb R}_+} y^{1-2\sigma} (\nabla u)^2\;dxdy+ \int_{\{y=0\}} u^\gamma\;dx\quad \text{subject to}\;u\geq0, \] where \((x,y)\) lies in the upper half-space \({\mathbb R}^n\times {\mathbb R}_+\) and \(0<\sigma,\;\gamma<1\). The first term of the energy functional is related to the fractional Laplace operator, while the second one is thought of as imposing an energy penalty when \(u > 0.\) When the local values of \(u\) are sufficiently small, the set \(\{u = 0\}\) is nontrivial, lying on \(\{y = 0\},\) and its boundary is called the free boundary. The author proves that in any neighborhood of a free boundary point, the minimizer is bounded by a power of the distance to the free boundary. Namely, if \(0\) is a free boundary point, then \(\sup_{x\in B_r}u(x,0)\leq Cr^\beta\) and this, combined with the interior estimates, implies \(C^\beta\)-regularity of the energy minimizers with a Hölder seminorm depending only on the distance to the free boundary. The exponent \(\beta={{2\sigma}\over{2-\gamma}}\) is the critical scaling exponent for the problem and gives the optimal regularity of \(u.\) Precisely, the author proves also that \(\sup_{x\in B_r}u(x,0)\geq C'r^\beta\) in any ball of radius \(r\) about a free boundary point, where the constant \(C'\) depends only on \(n,\) \(\sigma\) and \(\gamma.\) In the course of proving the optimal regularity, the author derives also an improvement of the boundary Harnack inequality of due to \textit{L. Caffarelli} et~al. [Indiana Univ. Math. J. 30, 621--640 (1981; Zbl 0512.35038)], which may be of interest even to researchers not working in free boundaries.

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