scientific article; zbMATH DE number 2186847

Length, area, volume, other geometric measure theory (28A75) Research exposition (monographs, survey articles) pertaining to potential theory (31-02) Geometric methods in ordinary differential equations (34A26) Research exposition (monographs, survey articles) pertaining to partial differential equations (35-02) Free boundary problems for PDEs (35R35)

Review text

This book contains a description of new developments in the study of harmonic measure for non-smooth domains. In particular, the authors present recent work of Carlos Kenig and Tatiana Toro on end-point analogues of potential-theoretic classical results of Kellog, showing that the density \(k\) of the harmonic measure of a \(C^{1,\alpha}\) domain has logarithm in \(C^{\alpha}\), as well as a converse result, known as the free boundary regularity theorem of Alt-Caffarelli, which says that under certain conditions, if \(\log k\) is \(C^{\alpha}\), then the domain must be of class \(C^{1,\alpha}\). At the beginning of the book, the authors provide some motivation and history for the problems studied, starting with the solution of the Dirichlet problem for a connected open subset \(\Omega\) of \({\mathbb R}^{n+1}\). The idea is that one expects that regularity or smoothness properties of the domain imply regularity or smoothness of the solutions to the problem. More precisely, one associates to the solutions of the equations on \(\Omega\), via classical representation theorems, a harmonic measure and a Poisson kernel, and one is interested in the relationship between the regularity of the domain \(\Omega\) on one hand and properties like the doubling character of the harmonic measure and the smoothness of the associated Poisson kernel on the other hand. The book also contains an introductory chapter which constitutes a self-contained exposition of the results, and a chapter which includes background material which focuses on the case of planar domains (\(n=1\)) on potential theory and its relation with the conformal geometry of these domains. This chapter also contains a review of the real variable theory of weights, as well as a description of the space BMO of functions with bounded oscillation and its subspace VMO of functions which have the additional property that their mean oscillation over small cubes is compact. The main part of the book is a study of the geometry of the classes of Reifenberg flat domains and of chord arc domains. The Reifenberg flat domains include the Lipschitz domains with small constant and possess good parametrizations. They were first studied in the 1960s in relation with the Plateau problem. They have been extensively studied in recent years by Kenig and Toro. Chord domains were intoduced by S. Semmes who proved a decomposition theorem for these spaces. In the book under review, the authors give geometric hypotheses on the domain \(\Omega\) (namely vanishing Reifenberg and vanishing chord arc properties) that yield the potential-theoretic results, that is, the asymptotic optimally doubling property for harmonic measure for vanishing Reifenberg domains and \(\log k\in \text{VMO}\) for vanishing arc domains. Then, they describe how potential theory hypotheses, that is, the asymptotically optimally doubling property for the harmonic measure (resp. \(\log k\in \text{VMO}\)) yields regularity of the domain in terms of vanishing Reifenberg flatness (resp. vanishing chord arc property). The main results that are exposed on Reifenberg flat and on chord arc domains are contained in the papers [\textit{C. R. Kenig, T. Toro}, ``Harmonic measure on locally flat domains, Duke Math. J. 87, 509--551 (1997; Zbl 0878.31002) and ``Poisson kernel characterization of Reifenberg flat chord arc domains, Ann. Sci. Ecole Norm. Super. (4) 36, No. 3, 323--401 (2003; Zbl 1027.31005)]. In the last chapter of the book, the authors present results of G. David, C. R. Kenig and T. Toro on regularity results of Reifenberg flat domains in higher codimension.

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