Sharp stability of Alexandrov's theorem for $C^1$ domains in the small-excess regime

Abstract

We prove a sharp quantitative stability result for Alexandrov's theorem in arbitrary dimension for bounded $C^1$ open sets in a small-excess regime. More precisely, if $E\subset \mathbb R^n$ is a bounded $C^1$ open set with the same volume as the unit ball $B$, small excess, and scalar distributional mean curvature $\mathcal H_{\partial E}\in L^2(\partial E)$, then, up to a translation, $$ \operatorname{Exc}(E)+|EΔB|^2+|μ-(n-1)|^2 \le C(n)\|\mathcal H_{\partial E}-μ\|_{L^2(\partial E)}^2 \qquad \forall\,μ\in \mathbb R. $$ In other words, both the excess and the symmetric difference from the ball are controlled by the optimal $L^2$-oscillation of the mean curvature. This yields a sharp stability estimate in a genuinely non-parametric regime. The proof combines a $BV$ version of Fuglede's spectral-gap argument, a star-shaped rearrangement for sets of finite perimeter, quantitative estimates for the part of the boundary contained in the tentacles, and a polyhedral approximation argument for the non-graphical region. We note that the $C^1$ regularity assumption enters only as a qualitative technical ingredient of the proof, but all constants in the final estimate depend only on the dimension.