A sharp Trudinger-Moser type inequality for unbounded domains in $\mathbb{R}^n$

Abstract

The Trudinger-Moser inequality states that for functions $u \in H_0^{1,n}(\Omega)$ ($\Omega \subset \mathbb R^n$ a bounded domain) with $\int_\Omega |\nabla u|^ndx \le 1$ one has $\int_\Omega (e^{\alpha_n|u|^{\frac n{n-1}}}-1)dx \le c |\Omega|$, with $c$ independent of $u$. Recently, the second author has shown that for $n = 2$ the bound $c |\Omega| $ may be replaced by a uniform constant $d$ independent of $\Omega$ if the Dirichlet norm is replaced by the Sobolev norm, i.e. requiring $\int_\Omega (|\nabla u|^n + |u|^n)dx \le 1$. We extend here this result to arbitrary dimensions $n > 2$. Also, we prove that for $\Omega = \mathbb R^n$ the supremum of $\int_{\mathbb R^n} (e^{\alpha_n|u|^{\frac n{n-1}}}-1)dx$ over all such functions is attained. The proof is based on a blow-up procedure.