The Friedland-Hayman inequality and Caffarelli's contraction theorem

Abstract

The Friedland-Hayman inequality is a sharp inequality concerning the growth rates of homogeneous, harmonic functions with Dirichlet boundary conditions on complementary cones dividing Euclidean space into two parts. In this paper, we prove an analogous inequality in which one divides a convex cone into two parts, placing Neumann conditions on the boundary of the convex cone, and Dirichlet conditions on the interface. This analogous inequality was already proved by us jointly with Sarah Raynor. Here we present a new proof that permits us to characterize the case of equality. In keeping with the two-phase free boundary theory introduced by Alt, Caffarelli, and Friedman, such an improvement can be expected to yield further regularity in free boundary problems.