Put and
First suppose . For an interior ball , with , write , , and . Constant shifts of a divergence-form elliptic operator change its forcing. The two nonnegative weak supersolutions and satisfy, respectively,
Their Weak Harnack inequalities on therefore have forcing errors bounded by . Indeed , the new divergence forcing is bounded by , and the scalar forcing by ; also .
On we have . Even if , the elementary inequality implies
The sum of the two essential infima is . Enlarging a uniform constant gives
where . This is an oscillation decay estimate; inhomogeneous oscillation decay implies Hölder continuity. Choose
Iterating on concentric balls, starting at a fixed admissible radius , yields
The strict choice of bounds the geometric series, including the case in which the two original decay rates coincide. Monotonicity of oscillation extends this bound to intermediate radii.
Take uniformly smaller than the distance of from the boundary of . The vanishing essential oscillation produces a continuous representative of . A ball centred at either of two sufficiently close points of contains both, so its oscillation bounds their difference by . For separated points use . Thus the Hölder seminorm satisfies
The constants depend only on the indicated domain separation, dimension, coefficient norms, uniform ellipticity bounds and . If the global essential supremum is infinite, the displayed global estimate is vacuous; local boundedness of weak elliptic subsolutions on slightly larger compact subsets still makes the same argument prove interior Hölder continuity.
Work first with essential bounds. On a Euclidean ball , put , and . The functions and are nonnegative weak solutions, hence weak supersolutions. In , at least one of the sets and has at least half the measure.
In the first case, the Weak Harnack inequality applied to gives
In the second case, applying it to gives the same lower bound for the improvement of the minimum. Thus the oscillation decay estimate is
This measure argument works even when , avoiding a false use of the triangle inequality in that range.
Iteration yields , with, for example, . At Lebesgue points the shrinking oscillations define a unique continuous representative, and the estimate extends to every point by continuity. For at distance less than , apply the estimate to a Euclidean ball centred at with initial radius and final radius comparable to . This Euclidean ball stays in . Larger distances use the trivial bound . We obtain
The constants depend only on . This derives the relevant conclusion of the De Giorgi-Nash-Moser theorem directly from part (a).
On a ball , both
are nonnegative solutions and hence supersolutions. Combining the Weak Harnack inequality with the local boundedness estimate for subsolutions gives an oscillation decay estimate
where depends only on . Iteration yields Hölder continuity with some exponent . The local -to- estimate controls the initial oscillation and gives