Solution

ID: past-exam-of-the-mathematics-course-of-the-university-of-cambridge/2017/iii/paper-107/5/a/solution

Adopt the sign convention that a weak supersolution for satisfies , or for every nonnegative compactly supported test function. For a nonnegative supersolution, the Weak Harnack inequality gives some and , depending only on , such that
Here denotes the average over ; equivalently the right side gives a lower bound for the essential infimum. One may take a sufficiently small positive exponent, so no assumption is needed. The inequality is unchanged under translations and dilations of the Euclidean balls.
Since a Sobolev space element is defined up to changes on a null set, the infimum is initially essential. After choosing a continuous representative it is the ordinary infimum. Without choosing such a representative, an arbitrary pointwise infimum cannot be bounded by an integral.

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