Boundary Harnack principle and gradient estimates for fractional Laplacian perturbed by non-local operators

TL;DR

This paper proves a boundary Harnack principle and gradient estimates for harmonic functions related to a class of non-local operators combining fractional Laplacians and non-local perturbations, extending understanding of their boundary behavior.

Contribution

It establishes the boundary Harnack principle and gradient estimates for harmonic functions of a perturbed fractional Laplacian in fat open sets, under certain conditions on the perturbation function.

Findings

Proved a uniform boundary Harnack principle for harmonic functions.

Established uniform gradient estimates in open sets.

Extended boundary behavior analysis to non-local operators with perturbations.

Abstract

Suppose $d\ge 2$ and $0<\beta<\alpha<2$. We consider the non-local operator $\mathcal{L}^{b}=\Delta^{\alpha/2}+\mathcal{S}^{b}$, where $$\mathcal{S}^{b}f(x):=\lim_{\varepsilon\to 0}\mathcal{A}(d,-\beta)\int_{|z|>\varepsilon}\left(f(x+z)-f(x)\right)\frac{b(x,z)}{|z|^{d+\beta}}\,dy.$$ Here $b(x,z)$ is a bounded measurable function on $\mathbb{R}^{d}\times\mathbb{R}^{d}$ that is symmetric in $z$, and $\mathcal{A}(d,-\beta)$ is a normalizing constant so that when $b(x, z)\equiv 1$, $\mathcal{S}^{b}$ becomes the fractional Laplacian $\Delta^{\beta/2}:=-(-\Delta)^{\beta/2}$. In other words, $$\mathcal{L}^{b}f(x):=\lim_{\varepsilon\to 0}\mathcal{A}(d,-\beta)\int_{|z|>\varepsilon}\left(f(x+z)-f(x)\right) j^b(x, z)\,dz,$$ where $j^b(x, z):= \mathcal{A}(d,-\alpha) |z|^{-(d+\alpha)}+ \mathcal{A}(d,-\beta) b(x, z)|z|^{-(d+\beta)}$. It is recently established in Chen and Wang [arXiv:1312.7594 [math.PR]] that, when $j^b(x, z)\geq 0$ on $\mathbb{R}^d\times \mathbb{R}^d$, there is a conservative Feller process $X^{b}$ having $\mathcal{L}^b$ as its infinitesimal generator. In this paper we establish, under certain conditions on $b$, a uniform boundary Harnack principle for harmonic functions of $X^b$ (or equivalently, of $\mathcal{L}^b$) in any $\kappa$-fat open set. We further establish uniform gradient estimates for non-negative harmonic functions of $X^{b}$ in open sets.