On the curvature of some free boundaries in higher dimensions

Björn Gustafsson, Makoto Sakai

Published 2011-12-20Version 1

It is known that any subharmonic quadrature domain in two dimensions satisfies a natural inner ball condition, in other words there is a specific upper bound on the curvature of the boundary. This result directly applies to free boundaries appearing in obstacle type problems and in Hele-Shaw flow. In the present paper we make partial progress on the corresponding question in higher dimensions. Specifically, we prove the equivalence between several different ways to formulate the inner ball condition, and we compute the Brouwer degree for a geometrically important mapping related to the Schwarz potential of the boundary. The latter gives in particular a new proof in the two dimensional case.