Stable Gaussian Minimal Bubbles

Abstract

It is shown that $3$ disjoint sets with fixed Gaussian volumes that partition $\mathbb{R}^{n}$ with nearly minimum total Gaussian surface area must be close to adjacent $120$ degree sectors, when $n\geq2$. These same results hold for any number $m\leq n+1$ of sets partitioning $\mathbb{R}^{n}$, conditional on the solution of a finite-dimensional optimization problem (similar to the endpoint case of the Plurality is Stablest Problem, or the Propeller Conjecture of Khot and Naor). When $m>3$, the minimal Gaussian surface area is achieved by the cones over a regular simplex. We therefore strengthen the Milman-Neeman Gaussian multi bubble theorem to a "stability" statement. Consequently, we obtain the first known dimension-independent bounds for the Plurality is Stablest Conjecture for three candidates for a small amount of noise (and for $m>3$ candidates, conditional on the solution of a finite-dimensional optimization problem). In particular, we classify all stable local minima of the Gaussian surface area of $m$ sets. We focus exclusively on volume-preserving variations of the sets, avoiding the use of matrix-valued partial differential inequalities. Lastly, we remove the convexity assumption from our previous result on the minimum Gaussian surface area of a symmetric set of fixed Gaussian volume.