An exceptional property of the one-dimensional Bianchi-Egnell inequality

TL;DR

This paper investigates the Bianchi-Egnell inequality in one dimension, revealing a unique property where the quotient exceeds the minimal value near the Sobolev optimizer manifold, suggesting no minimizer exists in this setting.

Contribution

It uncovers a surprising dimension-dependent behavior of the Bianchi-Egnell quotient in one dimension and proposes a conjecture about the non-existence of minimizers in this case.

Findings

In dimension one, the quotient exceeds the infimum near the optimizer manifold.

Numerical evidence supports the conjecture of no minimizer in 1D.

The behavior contrasts with higher dimensions, where minimizers exist.

Abstract

In this paper, for $d \geq 1$ and $s \in (0,\frac{d}{2})$, we study the Bianchi-Egnell quotient \[ \mathcal Q(f) = \inf_{f \in \dot{H}^s(\mathbb R^d) \setminus \mathcal B} \frac{\|(-\Delta)^{s/2} f\|_{L^2(\mathbb R^d)}^2 - S_{d,s} \|f\|_{L^{\frac{2d}{d-2s}}(\mathbb R^d)}^2}{\text{dist}_{\dot{H}^s(\mathbb R^d)}(f, \mathcal B)^2}, \qquad f \in \dot{H}^s(\mathbb R^d) \setminus \mathcal B, \] where $S_{d,s}$ is the best Sobolev constant and $\mathcal B$ is the manifold of Sobolev optimizers. By a fine asymptotic analysis, we prove that when $d = 1$, there is a neighborhood of $\mathcal B$ on which the quotient $\mathcal Q(f)$ is larger than the lowest value attainable by sequences converging to $\mathcal B$. This behavior is surprising because it is contrary to the situation in dimension $d \geq 2$ described recently in \cite{Koenig}. This leads us to conjecture that for $d = 1$, $\mathcal Q(f)$ has no minimizer on $\dot{H}^s(\mathbb R^d) \setminus \mathcal B$, which again would be contrary to the situation in $d \geq 2$. As a complement of the above, we study a family of test functions which interpolates between one and two Talenti bubbles, for every $d \geq 1$. For $d \geq 2$, this family yields an alternative proof of the main result of \cite{Koenig}. For $d =1$ we make some numerical observations which support the conjecture stated above.