A tool for symmetry breaking and multiplicity in some nonlocal problems

Abstract

We prove some basic inequalities relating the Gagliardo-Nirenberg seminorms of a symmetric function $u$ on $\mathbb R^n$ and of its perturbation $u\varphi_\mu$, where $\varphi_\mu$ is a suitably chosen eigenfunction of the Laplace-Beltrami operator on the sphere $\mathbb S^{n-1}$, thus providing a technical but rather powerful tool to detect symmetry breaking and multiplicity phenomena in variational equations driven by the fractional Laplace operator. A concrete application to a problem related to the fractional Caffarelli-Kohn-Nirenberg inequality is given.