English

The Sphere Covering Inequality and Its Applications

Analysis of PDEs 2016-10-28 v3

Abstract

In this paper, we show that the total area of two distinct surfaces with Gaussian curvature equal to 1, which are also conformal to the Euclidean unit disk with the same conformal factor on the boundary, must be at least 4{\pi}. In other words, the areas of these surfaces must cover the whole unit sphere after a proper rearrangement. We refer to this lower bound of total area as the Sphere Covering Inequality. The inequality and its generalizations are applied to a number of open problems related to Moser- Trudinger type inequalities, mean field equations and Onsager vortices, etc, and yield optimal results.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1605.06481,
  title  = {The Sphere Covering Inequality and Its Applications},
  author = {Changfeng Gui and Amir Moradifam},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1605.06481},
  year   = {2016}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-22T14:05:56.783Z