An overdetermined problem in Riesz-potential and fractional Laplacian

Guozhen Lu, Jiuyi Zhu

Published 2011-01-09, updated 2011-02-01Version 2

The main purpose of this paper is to address two open questions raised by W. Reichel on characterizations of balls in terms of the Riesz potential and fractional Laplacian. For a bounded $C^1$ domain $\Omega\subset \mathbb R^N$, we consider the Riesz-potential $$u(x)=\int_{\Omega}\frac{1}{|x-y|^{N-\alpha}} \,dy$$ for $2\leq \alpha \not =N$. We show that $u=$ constant on the boundary of $\Omega$ if and only if $\Omega$ is a ball. In the case of $ \alpha=N$, the similar characterization is established for the logarithmic potential. We also prove that such a characterization holds for the logarithmic Riesz potential. This provides a characterization for the overdetermined problem of the fractional Laplacian. These results answer two open questions of W. Reichel to some extent.