English

On Sublevel Set Estimates and the Laplacian

Classical Analysis and ODEs 2019-10-04 v3

Abstract

Carbery proved that if u:RnRu:\mathbb{R}^n \rightarrow \mathbb{R} is a positive, strictly convex function satisfying detD2u1\det D^2u \geq 1, then we have the estimate {xRn:u(x)s}nsn/2 \left| \left\{x \in \mathbb{R}^n: u(x) \leq s \right\} \right| \lesssim_n s^{n/2} and this is optimal. We give a short proof that also implies other results. Our main result is an estimate for the sublevel set of functions u:[0,1]2Ru:[0,1]^2 \rightarrow \mathbb{R} satisfying 1Δuc1 \leq \Delta u \leq c for some universal constant cc: for any α>0\alpha > 0, we have {x[0,1]2:u(x)ε}cε+εα12[0,1]2uuαdx. \left| \left\{x \in [0,1]^2 : |u(x)| \leq \varepsilon\right\}\right| \lesssim_{c} \sqrt{\varepsilon} + \varepsilon^{\alpha - \frac12} \int_{[0,1]^2}{\frac{|\nabla u|}{|u|^{\alpha}} dx}. For 'typical' functions, we expect the integral to be finite for α<1\alpha < 1. While Carbery-Christ-Wright have shown that no sublevel set estimates independent of uu exist, this result shows that for 'typical' functions satisfying Δu1\Delta u \geq 1, we expect the sublevel set to be ε1/2\lesssim \varepsilon^{1/2-}. We do not know whether this is sharp or whether similar statements are true in higher dimensions.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1905.13176,
  title  = {On Sublevel Set Estimates and the Laplacian},
  author = {Stefan Steinerberger},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1905.13176},
  year   = {2019}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-23T09:33:35.451Z