Extremals for Logarithmic Hardy-Littlewood-Sobolev inequalities on compact manifolds

Abstract

For a closed connected surface with a metric g, we consider the regularized trace of the inverse of the Laplace-Beltrami operator. We minimize this on the class of smooth metrics conformal to g having the same area, and show that the infimum is less than or equal to the value for the round sphere of the same area, and if it is equal, then it is attained. In fact we prove the analogs of these results for general dimensional compact manifolds. Explicitly, the results are logarithmic Hardy-Littlewood-Sobolev inequalites. By duality they give analogs of the Onofri-Beckner theorem.