As well known, harmonic functions satisfy the mean value property, namely the average of the function over a ball is equal to its value at the center. This fact naturally raises the question on whether this is a characterizing feature of balls, namely whether a set for which all harmonic functions satisfy the mean value property is necessarily a ball.
This question was investigated by several authors, and was finally elegantly, completely and positively settled by Ülkü Kuran, with an artful use of elementary techniques.
This classical problem has been recently fleshed out by Giovanni Cupini, Nicola Fusco, Ermanno Lanconelli and Xiao Zhong who proved a quantitative stability result for the mean value formula, showing that a suitable "mean value gap" (measuring the normalized difference between the average of harmonic functions on a given set and their pointwise value) is bounded from below by the Lebesgue measure of the "gap" between the set and the ball (and, consequently, by the Fraenkel asymmetry of the set). That is, if a domain "almost" satisfies the mean value property, then it must be necessarily close to a ball.
Here we investigate the nonlocal counterparts of these results. In particular we will prove a classification result and a stability result, establishing that: if fractional harmonic functions enjoy a suitable exterior average property for a given domain, then the domain is necessarily a ball, a suitable "nonlocal mean value gap" is bounded from below by an appropriate measure of the difference between the set and the ball. Differently from the classical case, some of our arguments rely on purely nonlocal properties, with no classical counterpart, such as the fact that "all functions are locally fractional harmonic up to a small error".
Our concern in this paper is to study the qualitative properties for harmonic functions related to the fractional Laplacian. Firstly we classify the polynomials in the whole space and in the half space for the fractional Laplacian defined in a principle value sense at infinity. Secondly, we study the fractional harmonic functions in half space with singularities on the boundary and the related distributional identities.
We provide necessary and sufficient geometric conditions for the exact controllability of the one-dimensional fractional free and fractional harmonic Schrödinger equations. The necessary and sufficient condition for the exact controllability of fractional free Schrödinger equations is derived from the Logvinenko-Sereda theorem and its quantitative version established by Kovrijkine, whereas the one for the exact controllability of fractional harmonic Schrödinger equations is deduced from an infinite dimensional version of the Hautus test for Hermite functions and the Plancherel-Rotach formula.
This article addresses the regularity issue for stationary or minimizing fractional harmonic maps into spheres of order $s\in(0,1)$ in arbitrary dimensions. It is shown that such fractional harmonic maps are $C^\infty$ away from a small closed singular set. The Hausdorff dimension of the singular set is also estimated in terms of $s\in(0,1)$ and the stationarity/minimality assumption.
This article addresses the regularity issue for minimizing fractional harmonic maps of order $s\in(0,1/2)$ from an interval into a smooth manifold. Hölder continuity away from a locally finite set is established for a general target. If the target is the standard sphere, then Hölder continuity holds everywhere.
In this paper, we study the fractional harmonic gradient flow on $S^1$ taking values in $S^{n-1} \subset \mathbb{R}^n$ for every $n \geq 2$, in particular addressing uniqueness and regularity of solutions in the so-called energy class with sufficiently small energy, adding to the existing body of knowledge which includes existence of solutions and certain bubbling phenomena.
We prove the existence of extremals for fractional Moser-Trudinger inequalities in an interval and on the whole real line. In both cases we use blow-up analysis for the corresponding Euler-Lagrange equation, which requires new sharp estimates obtained via commutator techniques.
We provide a fractional counterpart of the classical results by Schwarz and Malmheden on harmonic functions. From that we obtain a representation formula for $s$-harmonic functions as a linear superposition of weighted classical harmonic functions which also entails a new proof of the fractional Harnack inequality. This proof also leads to optimal constants for the fractional Harnack inequality in the ball.
In this paper, we continue to study the fractional harmonic gradient flow on $S^{n-1}$ taking values in a general closed manifold $N \subset \mathbb{R}^n$, addressing global existence and uniqueness of solutions of energy class with sufficiently small energy, adding to the existing body of knowledge pertaining to the half-harmonic gradient flow and expanding upon our previous work in [34]. We extend the techniques by Struwe in [30] and Rivière in [22] to the non-local framework analogous to [34] to derive uniqueness, employ commutator estimates as in [8] for regularity and follow [30] for a ge…
This paper is devoted to the asymptotic analysis of a fractional version of the Ginzburg-Landau equation in bounded domains, where the Laplacian is replaced by an integro-differential operator related to the square root Laplacian as defined in Fourier space. In the singular Ginzburg-Landau limit, we show that solutions with uniformly bounded energy converge weakly to sphere valued 1/2-harmonic maps, i.e., the fractional analogues of the usual harmonic maps. In addition, the convergence holds in smooth functions spaces away from a (n-1)-rectifiable closed set of finite (n-1)-Hausdorff measure. …
We study existence, uniqueness and boundary blow-up profile for fractional harmonic functions on a bounded smooth domain $Ω\subset \mathbb R^N$. We deal with harmonic functions associated to uniformly elliptic, fully nonlinear nonlocal operators, including the linear case $$ (-Δ)^s u = 0 \quad \mbox{in} \ Ω, $$ where $(-Δ)^s$ denotes the fractional Laplacian of order $2s \in (0,2)$. We use the viscosity solution's theory and Perron's method to construct harmonic functions with zero exterior condition in $\bar Ω^c$, and boundary blow-up profile $$ \lim_{x\to x_0, x \in Ω}\mathrm{dist}(x, \parti…
We prove continuity on domains up to the boundary for n/2-polyharmonic maps into manifolds. Technically, we show how to adapt Helein's direct approach to the fractional setting. This extends a remark by the author that this is possible in the setting of Riviere's famous regularity result for critical points of conformally invariant variational functionals. Moreover, pointwise behavior for the involved three-commutators is established. Continuity up to the boundary is then obtained via an adaption of Hildebrandt and Kaul's technique to the non-local setting.
In this paper, we are concerned with equations \eqref{PDE} involving higher-order fractional Laplacians. By introducing a new approach, we prove the super poly-harmonic properties for nonnegative solutions to \eqref{PDE} (Theorem \ref{Thm0}). Our theorem seems to be the first result on this problem. As a consequence, we derive many important applications of the super poly-harmonic properties. For instance, we establish Liouville theorems, integral representation formula and classification results for nonnegative solutions to fractional higher-order equations \eqref{PDE} with general nonlineari…
We present a notion of weak solution for the Dirichlet problem driven by the fractional Laplacian, following the Stampacchia theory. Then, we study semilinear problems on bounded domains $Ω$ with two different boundary conditions at the same time: the shape of the solution outside $Ω$ and a weighted limit to the boundary. We allow the nonlinearity to be positive or negative and we look for solutions blowing up at the boundary. Our starting observation is the existence of s-harmonic functions which explode at the boundary: these will be used both as supersolutions in the case of negative nonlin…
In this paper we show a density property for fractional weighted Sobolev spaces. That is, we prove that any function in a fractional weighted Sobolev space can be approximated by a smooth function with compact support. The additional difficulty in this nonlocal setting is caused by the fact that the weights are not necessarily translation invariant.
We establish some fixed-time decay estimates in Lebesgue spaces for the fractional heat propagator $e^{-tH^β}$, $t, β>0$, associated with the harmonic oscillator $H=-Δ+ |x|^2$. We then prove some local and global wellposedness results for nonlinear fractional heat equations.
In this paper, we establish the following Liouville theorem for fractional \emph{p}-harmonic functions. {\em Assume that $u$ is a bounded solution of $$(-\lap)^s_p u(x) = 0, \;\; x \in \mathbb{R}^n,$$ with $0<s<1$ and $p \geq 2$. Then $u$ must be constant.} A new idea is employed to prove this result, which is completely different from the previous ones in deriving Liouville theorems. For any given hyper-plane in $\mathbb{R}^n$, we show that $u$ is symmetric about the plane. To this end, we established a {\em maximum principle} for anti-symmetric functions on any half space. We believe that th…
The uniqueness of the positive ground state solutions of fractional Shrodinger equations with a harmonic potential has not been covered by the breakthrough method developed in [1, 2]. It has remained an open question for years. [3] and [5] were quite recently able to prove the existence of the ground state solutions and to derive important properties but they failed to address the uniqueness. [3] left it as an open question, and [5] run numerical simulations that were in favor of the uniqueness. Very recently, the authors of this note developed a general and unified method to prove the uniquen…
In this paper we consider critical points of the following nonlocal energy {equation} {\cal{L}}_n(u)=\int_{\R^n}| ({-Δ})^{n/4} u(x)|^2 dx\,, {equation} where $u\colon H^{n/2}(\R^n)\to{\cal{N}}\,$ ${\cal{N}}\subset\R^m$ is a compact $k$ dimensional smooth manifold without boundary and $n>1$ is an odd integer. Such critical points are called $n/2$-harmonic maps into ${\cal{N}}$. We prove that $Δ^{n/2} u\in L^p_{loc}(\R^n)$ for every $p\ge 1$ and thus $u\in C^{0,α}_{loc}(\R^n)\,.$ The local Hölder continuity of $n/2$-harmonic maps is based on regularity results obtained in \cite{DL1} for nonlocal…
We prove a nonlocal, nonlinear commutator estimate concerning the transfer of derivatives onto testfunctions. For the fractional $p$-Laplace operator it implies that solutions to certain degenerate nonlocal equations are higher differentiable. Also, weak fractional $p$-harmonic functions which a priori are less regular than variational solutions are in fact classical. As an application we show that sequences of uniformly bounded $\frac{n}{s}$-harmonic maps converge strongly outside at most finitely many points.
Asymptotics of solutions to fractional elliptic equations with Hardy type potentials is studied in this paper. By using an Almgren type monotonicity formula, separation of variables, and blow-up arguments, we describe the exact behavior near the singularity of solutions to linear and semilinear fractional elliptic equations with a homogeneous singular potential related to the fractional Hardy inequality. As a consequence we obtain unique continuation properties for fractional elliptic equations.
We show that p-harmonic functions in the plane satisfy a nonlinear asymptotic mean value property for p>1. This extends previous results of Manfredi and Lindqvist for certain range of p's.
We investigate the existence, uniqueness, and $L^1$-contractivity of weak solutions to a porous medium equation with fractional diffusion on an evolving hypersurface. To settle the existence, we reformulate the equation as a local problem on a semi-infinite cylinder, regularise the porous medium nonlinearity and truncate the cylinder. Then we pass to the limit first in the truncation parameter and then in the nonlinearity, and the identification of limits is done using the theory of subdifferentials of convex functionals. In order to facilitate all of this, we begin by studying (in the setting…
Mean value formulas are of great importance in the theory of partial differential equations: many very useful results are drawn, for instance, from the well known equivalence between harmonic functions and mean value properties. In the nonlocal setting of fractional harmonic functions, such an equivalence still holds, and many applications are now-days available. The nonlinear case, corresponding to the $p$-Laplace operator, has also been recently investigated, whereas the validity of a nonlocal, nonlinear, counterpart remains an open problem. In this paper, we propose a formula for the \emph{…
This paper addresses the approximation of fractional harmonic maps. Besides a unit-length constraint, one has to tackle the difficulty of nonlocality. We establish weak compactness results for critical points of the fractional Dirichlet energy on unit-length vector fields. We devise and analyze numerical methods for the approximation of various partial differential equations related to fractional harmonic maps. The compactness results imply the convergence of numerical approximations. Numerical examples on spin chain dynamics and point defects are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of …
In this article, we consider the diffusion equation with multi-term time-fractional derivatives. We first derive that the solution is positive when the source term is nonpositive by a subordination principle for the solution. As an application, we prove that the uniqueness of the inverse problem on the determination of the temporally varying source term by integral type information in a subdomain. Finally, several numerical experiments are presented to show the accuracy and efficiency of the algorithm.
In this paper we discuss the relation between non-homogeneous nonlinear fractional diffusive equations and the Schrodinger equation with time-dependent harmonic potential. It is well known that the Cole-Hopf transformation allows to linearize non-homogeneous nonlinear diffusive equations (NHNDEs) into a Schrodinger-type equation with time-dependent potential. We first discuss the utility of the results about time-dependent harmonic oscillator to build explicit solution of such non-homogeneous nonlinear partial differential equations. In particular, we recall that starting from a trial polynomi…
We investigate a fractional notion of gradient and divergence operator. We generalize the div-curl estimate by Coifman-Lions-Meyer-Semmes to fractional div-curl quantities, obtaining, in particular, a nonlocal version of Wente's lemma. We demonstrate how these quantities appear naturally in nonlocal geometric equations, which can be used to obtain a theory for fractional harmonic maps analogous to the local theory. Firstly, regarding fractional harmonic maps into spheres, we obtain a conservation law analogous to Shatah's conservation law and give a new regularity proof analogous to Hélein's f…
The classical and the fractional Laplacians exhibit a number of similarities, but also some rather striking, and sometimes surprising, structural differences. A quite important example of these differences is that any function (regardless of its shape) can be locally approximated by functions with locally vanishing fractional Laplacian, as it was recently proved by Serena Dipierro, Ovidiu Savin and myself. This informal note is an exposition of this result and of some of its consequences.
We prove Hoelder continuity for n/2-harmonic maps from subsets of Rn into a sphere. This extends a recent one-dimensional result by F. Da Lio and T. Riviere to arbitrary dimensions. The proof relies on compensation effects which we quantify adapting an approach for Wente's inequality by L. Tartar, instead of Besov-space arguments which were used in the one-dimensional case. Moreover, fractional analogues of Hodge decomposition and higher order Poincare inequalities as well as several localization effects for nonlocal operators similar to the fractional laplacian are developed and applied.
We first formulate an inverse problem for a linear fractional Lamé system. We determine the Lamé parameters from exterior partial measurements of the Dirichlet-to-Neumann map. We further study an inverse obstacle problem as well as an inverse problem for a nonlinear fractional Lamé system. Our arguments are based on the unique continuation property for the fractional operator as well as the associated Runge approximation property.
The existence and nonexistence of $λ$-harmonic functions in unbounded domains of $\mathbb{H}^n$ are investigated. We prove that if the $(n-1)/2$ Hausdorff measure of the asymptotic boundary of a domain $Ω$ is zero, then there is no bounded $λ$-harmonic function of $Ω$ for $λ\in [0,λ_1(\mathbb{H}^n)]$, where $λ_1(\mathbb{H}^n)=(n-1)^2/4$. For these domains, we have comparison principle and some maximum principle. Conversely, for any $s>(n-1)/2,$ we prove the existence of domains with asymptotic boundary of dimension $s$ for which there are bounded $λ_1$-harmonic functions that decay exponential…
A Carleman estimate and the unique continuation property of solutions for a multi-terms time fractional diffusion equation up to order $α\,\,(0<α<2)$ and general time dependent second order strongly elliptic time elliptic operator for the diffusion. The estimate is derived via some subelliptic estimate for an operator associated to this equation using calculus of pseudo-differential operators. A special Holmgren type transformation which is linear with respect to time is used to show the local unique continuation of solutions. We developed a new argument to derive the global unique continuatio…
We consider critical points of the energy $E(v) := \int_{\mathbb{R}^n} |\nabla^s v|^{\frac{n}{s}}$, where $v$ maps locally into the sphere or $SO(N)$, and $\nabla^s = (\partial_1^s,\ldots,\partial_n^s)$ is the formal fractional gradient, i.e. $\partial_α^s$ is a composition of the fractional laplacian with the $α$-th Riesz transform. We show that critical points of this energy are Hölder continuous. As a special case, for $s = 1$, we obtain a new, more stable proof of Fuchs and Strzelecki's regularity result of $n$-harmonic maps into the sphere, which is interesting on its own.
In this paper, we first establish a weak unique continuation property for time-fractional diffusion-advection equations. The proof is mainly based on the Laplace transform and the unique continuation properties for elliptic and parabolic equations. The result is weaker than its parabolic counterpart in the sense that we additionally impose the homogeneous boundary condition. As a direct application, we prove the uniqueness for an inverse problem on determining the spatial component in the source term in by interior measurements. Numerically, we reformulate our inverse source problem as an opti…
In this article we study the strong unique continuation property for solutions of higher order (variable coefficient) fractional Schrödinger operators. We deduce the strong unique continuation property in the presence of subcritical and critical Hardy type potentials. In the same setting, we address the unique continuation property from measurable sets of positive Lebesgue measure. As applications we prove the antilocality of the higher order fractional Laplacian and Runge type approximation theorems which have recently been exploited in the context of nonlocal Calderón type problems. As our m…
This master thesis is based on the paper "Sharp commutator estimates via harmonic extensions" by Lenzmann and Schikorra, in which they proposed a method to prove estimates for commutators involving Riesz transforms, fractional Laplacians and Riesz potentials, see arXiv:1609.08547. These proofs only involve harmonic extensions to the upper half-space and integration by parts next to some elementary transfromations, since the deeper theory is concentrated in a variety of trace characterization results which can be used as a blackbox. In the first half of this thesis, after collecting some elemen…
We study the uncoupled space-time fractional operators involving time-dependent coefficients and formulate the corresponding inverse problems. Our goal is to determine the variable coefficients from the exterior partial measurements of the Dirichlet-to-Neumann map. We exploit the integration by parts formula for Riemann-Liouville and Caputo derivatives to derive the Runge approximation property for our space-time fractional operator based on the unique continuation property of the fractional Laplacian. This enables us to extend early unique determination results for space-fractional but time-l…
In this paper we develop the theory of Schauder estimates for the fractional harmonic oscillator $H^σ=(-Δ+|x|^2)^σ$, $0<σ<1$. More precisely, a new class of smooth functions $C^{k,α}_H$ is defined, in which we study the action of $H^σ$. It turns out that these spaces are the suited ones for this type of regularity estimates. In order to prove our results, an analysis of the interaction of the Hermite-Riesz transforms with the Hölder spaces $C^{k,α}_H$ is needed, that we believe of independent interest. The parallel results for the fractional powers of the Laplacian $(-Δ)^σ$ were applied by Caf…
We obtain an asymptotic representation formula for harmonic functions with respect to a linear anisotropic nonlocal operator. Furthermore we get a Bourgain-Brezis-Mironescu type limit formula for a related class of anisotropic nonlocal norms.
We give an appropriate version of the result in the paper by Dipierro, Savin, and Valdinoci for different, not necessarily fractional, powers of the Laplacian.
Let $0<α<2$, $p\geq 1$, $m\in\mathbb{N}_+$. Consider $u$ to be the positive solution of the PDE \begin{equation}\label{abstract PDE} (-Δ)^{\fracα{2}+m} u(x)=u^p(x) \quad\text{in }\mathbb{R}^n. \end{equation} Cao, Dai and Qin( Transactions of the American mathematical society, 2021) showed that, under the condition $u\in\mathcal{L}_α$, the PDE possesses super polyharmonic property $(-Δ)^{k+\fracα{2}}u\geq 0$ for $k=0,1,...,m-1$. In this paper, we show another kind of super polyharmonic property $(-Δ)^k u> 0$ for $k=1,...m$ under different conditions $(-Δ)^mu\in\mathcal{L}_α$ and $(-Δ)^m u\geq 0…
We study gradient estimates of $q$-harmonic functions $u$ of the fractional Schr{ö}dinger operator $Δ^{α/2} + q$, $α\in (0,1]$ in bounded domains $D \subset \R^d$. For nonnegative $u$ we show that if $q$ is H{ö}lder continuous of order $η> 1 - α$ then $\nabla u(x)$ exists for any $x \in D$ and $|\nabla u(x)| \le c u(x)/ (\dist(x,\partial D) \wedge 1)$. The exponent $1 - α$ is critical i.e. when $q$ is only $1 - α$ H{ö}lder continuous $\nabla u(x)$ may not exist. The above gradient estimates are well known for $α\in (1,2]$ under the assumption that $q$ belongs to the Kato class $\calJ^{α- 1}$. …
We consider Backus's problem in geophysics. This consists in reconstructing a harmonic potential outside the Earth when the intensity of the related field is measured on the Earth's surface. Thus, the boundary condition is (severely) nonlinear. The gravitational case is quite understood. It consists in the local resolution near a monopole, i.e. the potential generated by a point mass. In this paper, we consider the geomagnetic case. This consists in linearizing the field's intensity near the so-called dipole, a harmonic function which models the solenoidal potential of a magnet. The problem is…
