English

Poisson kernels on the half-plane are bell-shaped

Analysis of PDEs 2025-12-22 v2

Abstract

Consider a second-order elliptic operator LL in the half-plane R×(0,)\mathbb R \times (0, \infty) with coefficients depending only on the second coordinate. The Poisson kernel for LL is used in the representation of positive LL-harmonic functions, that is, solutions of Lu=0L u = 0. In probabilistic terms, the Poisson kernel is the density function of the distribution of the diffusion in R×(0,)\mathbb R \times (0, \infty) with generator LL at the hitting time of the boundary. We prove that the Poisson kernel for LL is bell-shaped: its nnth derivative changes sign nn times. In particular, it is unimodal and it has two inflection points (it is concave, then convex, then concave again).

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2501.16068,
  title  = {Poisson kernels on the half-plane are bell-shaped},
  author = {Mateusz Kwaśnicki},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2501.16068},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

17 pages; minor revision

R2 v1 2026-06-28T21:19:39.946Z