Aubin-Talenti bubble Created 2026-09-24 Updated 2026-10-03
At the energy-critical exponent , the normalized Aubin-Talenti bubble
solves and optimizes the critical Sobolev embedding theorem.
Once an distributional solution of gains regularity, expand the divergence term. Smooth multiplication makes the right side belong to whenever . Interior Poisson regularity gives . Iteration and the Sobolev embedding theorem produce a smooth representative.
Moser iteration Created 2026-09-28 Updated 2026-10-05
Moser iteration combines a Caccioppoli inequality with the Sobolev embedding theorem to raise an integrability exponent geometrically. On nested balls it turns an bound for a nonnegative subsolution of a uniformly elliptic divergence-form equation into a local supremum bound.
Use , so the Fourier transform of is . Distinguish the full degree- polynomial from its homogeneous top-degree part , the principal symbol. The elliptic differential operator condition is
It does not require the full polynomial to be nonzero at small frequencies. Compactness of the unit sphere gives . Homogeneity and the lower-degree remainder imply
For sufficiently large the second term is at most half the first, so the high-frequency lower bound for an elliptic polynomial is
Here is the Japanese bracket. The order-zero case just means a nonzero constant and is immediate.
For real , the Sobolev space definition with the current Fourier normalization is
Changing the harmless constant in the norm gives the same space. A distribution on belongs to the Local Sobolev space when , extended by zero outside , belongs to for every test function .
A compactly supported distribution of finite order of a distribution has a smooth Fourier transform satisfying , by applying the finite-order estimate to a fixed cutoff times the exponential. Thus its weighted squared transform is bounded by . This is integrable precisely in the sufficient range , and proves
This is the negative Sobolev regularity of a compactly supported distribution; the strict inequality is important, and is not a claim that this sufficient threshold is optimal for each distribution.
To establish elliptic regularity without assuming the answer as an a priori smoothness hypothesis, first obtain a global constant-coefficient gain. For a compactly supported distribution with , the polynomial lower bound at high frequency gives
On , the transform of is smooth and bounded. Therefore implies . Possible low-frequency zeros of are harmless; we never divide by them.
Two elementary mapping facts supply the variable-coefficient argument. Distributional derivatives of order map into . Sobolev multiplication by a smooth cutoff is bounded on for every real , including negative ones. Indeed, for a compactly supported smooth , the Peetre weight inequality
and reduce the bound to Young's convolution inequality with the integrable kernel . Smooth coefficients only need this property on compact subsets, where they can be multiplied by another cutoff.
Write the lower-order part as , with , and suppose provisionally that on a relatively compact neighborhood. For a cutoff function supported there,
The bracket is the operator commutator. Its order is at most : in the product rule, every surviving term has at least one derivative falling on . Choose a second cutoff function equal to one near when estimating the products. The derivative and smooth-multiplication bounds then give
The global gain just proved applies to the compactly supported distribution , and yields
This is the cutoff bootstrap for local elliptic regularity; it works for real indices, not just nonnegative integers.
There is always a legitimate starting index. Around any fixed point choose on a smaller neighborhood. The compactly supported distribution has the negative Sobolev regularity proved above, so on that neighborhood for some finite . The index need not be uniform over all of . Repeating the one-step gain finitely many times reaches , or the target is already reached if . Since the point was arbitrary,
For the result follows directly by dividing by the nonzero constant.
Finally, if , its forcing belongs to every Local Sobolev space. The gain consequently gives every local Sobolev order for . For each integer , choose an order larger than and apply the Sobolev embedding theorem to a localized solution. It has a representative; the representatives agree because they represent the same distribution. Thus every distributional solution of is smooth on .
We use the homogeneous version of the Sobolev embedding theorem in three dimensions:
Here homogeneous Sobolev space is the completion of compactly supported smooth functions in the L2 norm of the gradient, identified with its representative. Apply this Sobolev inequality both to and to its spatial derivatives.
Let
The Plancherel theorem identifies the L2 norm of the Hessian matrix with , because . In particular,
Differentiating the defocusing semilinear wave equation gives . By the Holder inequality with exponents and , the preceding Sobolev inequality, and conservation of the positive wave energy,
Use the inhomogeneous wave energy estimate simultaneously for the three spatial derivatives. It gives
The Gronwall inequality therefore yields . We may take the continuous, locally bounded function
The constant is universal; the dependence on the initial data is only through and . The H2 bound for the defocusing cubic wave equation holds on every existing smooth interval, without assuming the global conclusion. If or , the zero solution satisfies the same estimate.
Take . Then in every , including for . The supplied Sobolev embedding theorem, by the fixed scaling from to , gives .
Choose , equal to one on , supported in , with . Extend by zero to . The Caccioppoli inequality before discarding the cutoff weight gives
Also . Since and , both terms are controlled by . Applying the Sobolev embedding theorem to gives
Using a fixed ambient ball prevents the Sobolev constant from acquiring an unintended dependence on either radius.
The original PDF assumes at the beginning of this question; the TeX conversion omits that hypothesis. First replace a smooth nonnegative solution by , which solves the same homogeneous divergence-form elliptic equation. For , the chain rule gives the favorable term
in the distributional sense. Thus is a weak subsolution. Testing its subsolution inequality with yields the same Caccioppoli inequality as before. More precisely, testing the equation for with gives
Indeed the main term is at least , and the cross term is bounded by twice times the square roots of this weighted gradient integral and . Let to obtain the stated power energy estimate.
Apply the fixed-domain Sobolev embedding theorem to . The crucial constant stays uniform before taking the power:
where is independent of . This is uniform power gain for elliptic solutions. The exponent is , not the TeX conversion's . The PDF's weaker prefactor outside the power follows from this stronger estimate, but that weaker form alone cannot be iterated infinitely.
For completeness, the estimate also extends to nonnegative locally weak solutions without assuming they are already bounded. For define up to and continue it linearly with slope above ; set . Both have bounded derivatives for fixed . Direct calculation gives and . Test the weak equation with , using smooth approximations to these Sobolev chain rule functions if needed. The resulting weighted energy bound is . If , dominated convergence on the right and the Fatou lemma on the Sobolev left give the boxed gain as , with the same uniform constant. Starting with , this justifies every subsequent iteration step.
Choose nested interior open sets . For small , part (b) gives a smooth equation on of the form
The divergence-forcing interior H1 estimate is
One can obtain this estimate directly by testing the smooth equation against and applying Young inequality, with a cutoff function equal to one on and supported in . The approximate identity and the convolution bound give, uniformly in ,
with analogous bounds for and . The coefficients need only be bounded on . Therefore is bounded in . It converges to in , and weak sequential compactness in a Hilbert space in this Sobolev space gives . Since was arbitrary, .
Now expand the distributional derivative:
Its right side belongs to , so the interior elliptic regularity estimate gives . More generally, if for an integer , multiplication by the smooth coefficients puts the right side in . Interior elliptic regularity then gives . This elliptic regularity bootstrap proves for every integer .
For any nonnegative integer , choose . The Sobolev embedding theorem on compact interior subsets gives . Taking all proves , for its smooth representative. The first gain from to is the step supplied by the mollified equation; assuming in the initial definition would miss that step.
The Sobolev embedding theorem in dimension three, combined with the preceding estimate, gives
One direct justification of this embedding is a bounded Sobolev extension operator into , followed by Fourier inversion and the Cauchy-Schwarz inequality: bounds the inverse Fourier integral by the norm.
For radial forcing, the preceding part makes and . Set , and . The radial equation gives . Both zero boundary values imply
Moreover . Since , this proves the radial Poisson gradient estimate:
For a nonradial counterexample choose in the shell and a nonconstant . For sufficiently small , set and . These are smooth with support away from the boundary. Scaling gives
Thus the failure of L2-to-Linfinity Poisson gradient bounds in three dimensions is explicit, despite the valid and value-supremum estimates.
Take , the natural initial-data assumption needed for the requested convergence but not explicitly stated in this subpart. Use the genuine Dirichlet eigensystem from part (b)(iii) and put . The spectral construction of a parabolic solution is
Each finite sum has zero Dirichlet boundary condition and satisfies .
To justify all derivatives, fix . For any integers , the squared norm of a tail of the th time derivative is
uniformly for . Use the corrected Sobolev domains of powers of an elliptic Dirichlet operator, not the inaccurate unqualified assertion in the PDF. Their norm equivalence gives convergence in every ordinary . The Sobolev embedding theorem then gives convergence of every desired spatial derivative by choosing large enough. Thus termwise differentiation is justified, , and for every . The trace remains zero, and holds pointwise.
Finally Parseval identity gives
by the dominated convergence theorem, since each factor tends to zero and is bounded by one. No boundary compatibility of the initial data is required for positive-time smoothness.
Let be a multi-index with . The Cauchy-Schwarz inequality gives
The second integral is finite precisely under the sufficient inequality , which follows from . Hence is Lebesgue integrable for every .
The Fourier inversion theorem therefore defines a function
whose derivatives through order may be obtained by differentiating under the integral sign. Those derivatives are continuous, so . The inverse transform represents the same tempered distribution as ; consequently almost everywhere. This is the Sobolev embedding theorem in this range.