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Groupe de Travail Analyse

Cheeger's inequality: Linking Poincaré's inequality to an isoperimetric problem

Martin Rathmair

( IMB )

Salle de conférences

le 15 mai 2023 à 14:00

Following up on the last session, we again discuss Poincaré inequalities. Recall that given an open set ΩRn\Omega\subseteq \mathbb{R}^n and a non-negative weight ww the Poincaré constant is the smallest constant C>0C>0 such that infcRfcL2(Ω,wdx)CfL2(Ω,wdx) \inf_{c\in\mathbb{R}} \|f-c\|_{L^2(\Omega,w dx)} \le C \|\nabla f\|_{L^2(\Omega, w dx)} for all fL2(Ω,wdx)f\in L^2(\Omega, w dx) smooth. Clearly, if Ω\Omega consists of two (or more) connected components plugging in a piecewise constant function yields that the Poincaré constant is ++\infty. More generally, domains with weak connectivity allow construction of similar functions and therefore have large Poincaré constants. We will discuss and prove a result attributed to Cheff Cheeger, which relates the Poincaré constant to an isoperimetric quantity known as the Cheeger constant. The result may be understood as a converse statement to the above observation and be causally summarized by 'for the Poincaré constant to be large, the domain must have necessarily disconnected geometry'.