On Sharp Becknerβs Inequality for Axially Symmetric Functions on
Tuoxin Li
Department of Mathematics, University of British Columbia,Vancouver, Canada
[email protected],Β Juncheng Wei
Department of Mathematics, University of British Columbia,Vancouver, Canada
[email protected]Β andΒ Zikai Ye
Department of Mathematics, University of British Columbia,Vancouver, Canada
[email protected]
Abstract.
We prove that axially symmetric solutions to the -curvature type problem
must be constants, provided that . This result is sharp in view of the existence of nonconstant solutions to the equation by Gui,Hu and Xie [15] for . As a consequence, we prove a sharp Becknerβs inequality on
for axially symmetric functions with center of mass at the origin. This answers an open question in [15] in which the corresponding results were proved for . To close the gap, we make use of some quantitative properties of Gegenbauer polynomials. One of the key ingredients in our proof is the pointwise estimate of large parameters asymptotic expansions for Gegenbauer polynomials proved in Nemes and Daalhuis [23].
1. Introduction and Main Results
On , the Becknerβs inequality ([3]), a higher order Moser-Trudinger inequality, says that the functional
is non-negative, for and all , where d is the normalized Lebesgue measure on with . On the other hand, an improved higher order Moser-Trudinger-Onofri type inequality holds if the center of the mass of is at the origin: for belonging to the set
and for any , there exists some constant , such that . Here βs are the coordinate components of . As in second order case ([6]), it is conjectured that can be chosen to be for any .
The Euler-Lagrange equation of is the constant -curvature-type equation on
(1.1)
where is the Paneitz operator on . The conjecture holds if the equation (1.1) admits only constant solutions. For and close to , it is proved by the second author and Xu [24] that all solutions to (1.1) are constants. It remains open for general . For results and backgrounds on -curvature problems, we refer to [8, 9, 10, 11, 15, 18, 20, 21, 24] and the references therein.
The counterpart of this problem on is the so-called Nirenberg problem
and it has received lots of attention in the last four decades. We refer to [6, 7, 19] and the references therein.
It is conjectured by A.Chang and P.Yang [6, 7] that the following functional
is non-negative for any and with zero center of mass . Feldman, Froese,Ghoussoub and Gui [12] proved that the conjecture is true for axially symmetric functions when . Gui and the second author [17] proved that the conjecture is true for axially symmetric functions. Ghoussoub and Lin [13] showed that the conjecture is true for . Finally, Gui and Moradifam [14] proved that the conjecture is indeed true. See [5, 4] for references and more general results on improved Moser-Trudinger-Onofri inequality on and relations with SzegΓΆ limit theorem.
In this paper, we will study axially symmetric solution to (1.1) for . As in [15], (1.1) becomes
(1.2)
which is the critical point of the functional
restricted to the set
(1.3)
Our main result is
Theorem 1.1.
If , then the only critical point of the functional restricted to are constant functions. As a consequence we have the following improved Becknerβs inequality for axially symmetric functions on
The assumption on in Theorem 1.1 is sharp. By bifurcation methods, Gui,Hu and Xie [15] proved that Theorem 1.1 fails for . They also showed that Theorem 1.1 holds for , using similar strategies as in [12, 17]. More precisely, they expanded in terms of Gegenbauer polynomials and introduced a quantity (see (4.3)) and obtained an inequality for each . From these inequalities, they expected to go through similar induction procedure as in [17]. However, the estimates of Gegenbauer coefficients of they have obtained are not refined enough to make the induction procedure work for large modes. As a consequence, one cannot obtain the optimal constant by their method. See the discussion in [Section 6, [15]] for more details.
We will use the same strategy, as in [17, 15], but with more refined estimates on Gegenbauer coefficients of . In particular we make use of pointwise estimates proved in [Corollary 5.3, Nemes and Daalhuis[23]]. By refining the behavior of Gegenbauer polynomial near and using the decaying properties away from , we show that the induction procedure in [17] still works in this setting.
Under similar settings, this problem can be generalized to . Gui, Hu and Xie [16] showed that the counterparts of Theorem 1.1 fails for . When , they showed that for () and (), all critical points are constants. Whether or not the optimal constant is remains unknown. We believe that our estimates in this paper can give a unified proof for sharp Becknerβs inequality on , at least in the axially symmetric case. We will return to this in a future work.
The organization of this paper is as follows. In Section 2 we collect some properties of Gegenbauer polynomials and the expansions of (proved in [15]). In Section 3 we give refined estimates on the Gegenbauer coefficients of (Theorem 3.1). In Section 4 we prove the main Theorem 1.1 by induction argument. Three technical lemmas (Lemmas 3.2, 3.4 and 3.5) are proved in the appendices.
2. Preliminaries and some basic estimates
In this section, we collect some properties of Gegenbauer polynomials and some known facts on equation (1.2).
Recall that the Gegenbauer polynomials of order and degree ([22]) is given by
The derivative of satisfies
(2.1)
On the corresponding Gegenbauer polynomial for bi-Laplacian is . (On it is .) Let be the normalization of such that . More precisely,
The first few terms of are given as follows
Also, satisfies
(2.2)
and
(2.3)
As in [15, 17], we define the following key quantity
(2.4)
where is a solution to (1.2). Then satisfies the equation
(2.5)
where
(2.6)
We can expand in terms of the Gegenbauer polynomials :
Let , where is the -th coefficient in the expansion of (see (2.7)). The estimates of play a key role in the proofs of [15, 17]. In [15], they used (2.11) and the fact that
(3.1)
to estimate as follows
As discussed in Section 6 of [15], the above estimates are not sufficient to deduce the induction
(3.2)
as in [17]. With the bounds for the induction (3.2) fails for large .
The above discussions motivate us to find more refined estimate on , and hence on , for large . A key observation is that attains its maximum only at and it decays rapidly away from . See Figure 2 and Figure 2 below. As a result, we can improve to be . For simplicity, in the rest of the paper, we will denote
(3.3)
so that . One way to improve the estimate in (2.11) is to split the right hand integral in (2.11) into two parts. To this end, we define
(3.4)
where we recall . Without loss of generality, we may assume with .
The following theorem gives the key refined estimate for .
Theorem 3.1.
Let . If , then for all ,
(3.5)
As a consequence, satisfies
(3.6)
Remark 3.1.
The reason that we have to expand the estimate of to the next order term is that for large , the induction region is and hence the next order term should not be neglected.
Before we prove Theorem 3.1, we can first consider some cases where is small. In fact, using the fact that we can obtain much better estimates for small βs. The proof is left to Appendix A.
It is easy to see that the estimate of (3.7) becomes the worst when ; while the estimate of (3.8) becomes the worst when . The same is true for and provided that is suitably small. More generally, in (3.5) and (3.6), one can easily show that the estimates become the worst when if is even, and when if is odd. In fact, we can say more about this. See Lemma 4.1 below.
Now we derive some estimates about . By definition, ,
From the second integral in the above, we have
(3.11)
Since
we have
hence
(3.12)
Moreover,
(3.13)
and
(3.14)
To prove Theorem 3.1, we need some point-wise estimates on . The following Lemma gives us the asymptotic behavior of Gegenbauer polynomials.
Lemma 3.3(Corollary 5.3 of Nemes and Daalhuis [23] ).
Let and be an integer. Then
(3.15)
where , , and is the Pochhammer symbol. The remainder term satisfies the estimate
(3.16)
Using the pointwise estimate (3.15),
we can prove the following lower and upper bounds for . The proofs are left to Appendix B.
Lemma 3.4.
For all , we have
Lemma 3.5.
Let and . Then for all ,
The above two lemmas can be illustrated by the following two figures (Figure 1 and Figure 2): decays rapidly away from and its minimum is very small.
Figure 1. Graph of
Figure 2. on
With the aid of Lemma 3.4 and Lemma 3.5, we can prove Theorem 3.1 and get a refined estimate on .
By results of [15], which is restated in (4.4) below, we have and hence . It is then straightforward to check that for , the estimates for in LemmaΒ 3.2 is better than that in TheoremΒ 3.1, so in what follows we may assume .
Now we can start the induction procedure. First we rewrite (4) in terms of and :
By (4.4), we have . When , we apply Lemma Β 3.2 to (4), as mentioned in Remark 3.2, we may take in (3.7) and in (3.8). Direct computation then shows that . So (4.1) holds for .
By induction, we now suppose that for some . To prove that , we assume the contrary, . We will derive a contradiction, which proves .
where is defined at the last equality. Note that is quadratic in and convex. To get a contradiction, it suffices to check that the parabola is negative at both and .
When , we have
.
Note that the leading order term is negative (in fact it is less than ) and direct computation yields that . By similar computations we also derive that .
As a consequence, we get for any . Let tend to infinity, we get , which implies that , a contradiction.
In this appendix we prove Lemma 3.4 and Lemma 3.5. The proofs are technical and use many quantitative properties of Gegenbauer polynomials.
Before we prove LemmaΒ 3.4, we first state some general lemma about Gegenbauer polynomials. Denote by , , the zeros of enumerated in decreasing order, that is, .
If , then , and either (B.5) or (B.6) implies and so
Finally, if , then (B.5) implies . In this case, , and
. Now we can refine the estimate in (B.7) to get better estimates than (B.9) and (B.10). More precisely, we have
The proof is similar to that of LemmaΒ 3.4 above. We first prove the following estimate at one point:
(B.13)
Direct computation by Matlab shows that LemmaΒ 3.4 holds for , so in what follows we may assume . The main tool we use is still (B.3), and the only difference is that now .
The other direction is similar. The only difference is that we need to use (B) and (B) instead of (B) and (B). We omit the details. Thus (B.13) is proved.
Now in view of LemmaΒ 3.4, we see that . Then by LemmaΒ B.2 , for all . Moreover, the convexity of on is guaranteed by LemmaΒ B.2 . Thus the proof of Lemma 3.5 is completed.
β
Acknowledgements
J. Wei is partially supported by
NSERC of Canada. We thank Professor Changfeng Gui for interesting discussions.
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