Functional Inequalities: New Perspectives and New Applications

This book is not meant to be another compendium of select inequalities, nor does it claim to contain the latest or the slickest ways of proving them. This project is rather an attempt at describing how most functional inequalities are not merely the byproduct of ingenious guess work by a few wizards among us, but are often manifestations of certain natural mathematical structures and physical phenomena. Our main goal here is to show how this point of view leads to "systematic" approaches for not just proving the most basic functional inequalities, but also for understanding and improving them, and for devising new ones - sometimes at will, and often on demand.Comment: 17 pages; contact Nassif Ghoussoub (nassif @ math.ubc.ca) for a pre-publication pdf cop

Existence, stability and oscillation properties of slow decay positive solutions of supercritical elliptic equations with Hardy potential

We prove the existence of a family of slow decay positive solutions of a supercritical elliptic equation with Hardy potential in the entire space and study stability and oscillation properties of these solutions. We also establish the existence of a continuum of stable slow decay positive solutions for the relevant exterior Dirichlet problem

"Boundary blowup" type sub-solutions to semilinear elliptic equations with Hardy potential

Semilinear elliptic equations which give rise to solutions blowing up at the boundary are perturbed by a Hardy potential. The size of this potential effects the existence of a certain type of solutions (large solutions): if the potential is too small, then no large solution exists. The presence of the Hardy potential requires a new definition of large solutions, following the pattern of the associated linear problem. Nonexistence and existence results for different types of solutions will be given. Our considerations are based on a Phragmen-Lindelof type theorem which enables us to classify the solutions and sub-solutions according to their behavior near the boundary. Nonexistence follows from this principle together with the Keller-Osserman upper bound. The existence proofs rely on sub- and super-solution techniques and on estimates for the Hardy constant derived in Marcus, Mizel and Pinchover.Comment: 23 pages, 3 figure

Sobolev inequalities for the Hardy-Schr\"odinger operator: Extremals and critical dimensions

In this expository paper, we consider the Hardy-Schr\"odinger operator $-\Delta -\gamma/|x|^2$ on a smooth domain \Omega of R^n with 0\in\bar{\Omega}, and describe how the location of the singularity 0, be it in the interior of \Omega or on its boundary, affects its analytical properties. We compare the two settings by considering the optimal Hardy, Sobolev, and the Caffarelli-Kohn-Nirenberg inequalities. The latter rewrites: $C(\int_{\Omega}\frac{u^{p}}{|x|^s}dx)^{\frac{2}{p}}\leq \int_{\Omega} |\nabla u|^2dx-\gamma \int_{\Omega}\frac{u^2}{|x|^2}dx$ for all $u\in H^1_0(\Omega)$, where \gamma <n^2/4, s\in [0,2) and p:=2(n-s)/(n-2). We address questions regarding the explicit values of the optimal constant C, as well as the existence of non-trivial extremals attached to these inequalities. Scale invariance properties lead to situations where the best constants do not depend on the domain and are not attainable. We consider two different approaches to "break the homogeneity" of the problem: One approach was initiated by Brezis-Nirenberg and by Janelli. It is suitable for the case where 0 is in the interior of \Omega, and consists of considering lower order perturbations of the critical nonlinearity. The other approach was initiated by Ghoussoub-Kang , C.S. Lin et al. and Ghoussoub-Robert. It consists of considering domains where the singularity is on the boundary. Both of these approaches are rich in structure and in challenging problems. If 0\in \Omega, a negative linear perturbation suffices for higher dimensions, while a positive "Hardy-singular interior mass" is required in lower dimensions. If the singularity is on the boundary, then the local geometry around 0 plays a crucial role in high dimensions, while a positive "Hardy-singular boundary mass" is needed for the lower dimensions.Comment: Expository paper. 48 page

Positive solutions to singular semilinear elliptic equations with critical potential on cone-like domains

We study the existence and nonexistence of positive (super-)solutions to a singular semilinear elliptic equation $$-\nabla\cdot(|x|^A\nabla u)-B|x|^{A-2}u=C|x|^{A-\sigma}u^p$$ in cone--like domains of $\R^N$ ($N\ge 2$), for the full range of parameters $A,B,\sigma,p\in\R$ and $C>0$. We provide a complete characterization of the set of $(p,\sigma)\in\R^2$ such that the equation has no positive (super-)solutions, depending on the values of $A,B$ and the principle Dirichlet eigenvalue of the cross--section of the cone. The proofs are based on the explicit construction of appropriate barriers and involve the analysis of asymptotic behavior of super-harmonic functions associated to the Laplace operator with critical potentials, Phragmen--Lindel\"of type comparison arguments and an improved version of Hardy's inequality in cone--like domains.Comment: 30 pages, 1 figur

On semilinear elliptic equations with borderline Hardy potentials

In this paper we study the asymptotic behavior of solutions to an elliptic equation near the singularity of an inverse square potential with a coefficient related to the best constant for the Hardy inequality. Due to the presence of a borderline Hardy potential, a proper variational setting has to be introduced in order to provide a weak formulation of the equation. An Almgren-type monotonicity formula is used to determine the exact asymptotic behavior of solutions