Let be a form as in §4 with .
As explained in the introduction, the differentiability of the energy
is not a priori sufficient to make the variational approach work, i.e. to infer that a maximizer of the relevant functional over is necessarily a critical point. In order to circumvent this difficulty, we show as in [BB10] the differentiability of , where is the -psh envelope operator of §2.5. This idea was originally introduced by Alexandrov [Ale38] in the context of real Monge-Ampère equations.
Since , this property means that is concentrated on the contact locus . We refer to Appendix A for more information on the orthogonality property.
If and , observe that is -psh (i.e. is not identically ) since dominates the -psh function . Furthermore we have since the latter is usc.
Proof.
Note that implies , hence for all . We are going to show that
| (7.1) |
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For all . If is continuous, then the result follows
immediately from Theorem 7.2.
In general, let
be a decreasing sequence of -psh model functions
converging to , see Proposition 4.5.
For each the sequence is a decreasing
sequence of -psh functions, and we claim that .
Indeed let . Since , we have , hence .
Conversely, for all , hence and it follows
as required.
We apply (7.1) to :
| (7.2) |
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As , and
decrease to and , respectively
and by Proposition 6.9,
converges to
for each .
Finally (7.1) follows
from (7.2) using dominated convergence in view of
the upper bound for all and all .
∎
Proof of Theorem 7.2.
We follow the exposition in [BB10, §4.3] very closely.
Arguing as in Corollary 7.3 we may assume that . Set
.
We need to prove that
| (7.3) |
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As a first step, we linearize the problem and prove that
| (7.4) |
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Denote the left and right hand sides of (7.4) by
and , respectively. Note that the one-sided
derivatives exist since both and are concave.
Since is concave on the space of bounded -psh functions,
the function
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is also concave, hence
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by Proposition 6.3.
Taking and letting yields .
To prove the reverse inequality, fix .
Then there exists such that
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Since is the differential of , there exists
such that
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for .
The concavity of yields
.
Since is non-decreasing we get
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for
. Letting and we conclude .
This shows that (7.4) holds.
In view of (7.4) it remains to show that
| (7.5) |
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as .
Since , the orthogonality property implies
for -a.e. point. We thus have
-a.e. We claim that with
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Observe that
so that the claim implies
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which proves (7.5).
The estimate of is based on the
comparison principle.
Since is a model function, there exists
, such that and
are -psh by Proposition 2.6.
Note that
, and both functions
and are -psh.
The comparison principle then yields
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By expanding as polynomials in , we get
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and
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From these three estimates we conclude
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But , so the
orthogonality property implies that the last integral
vanishes. This concludes the proof.
∎
Remark 7.4.
Observe that the differentiability property of Theorem 7.2 conversely implies the orthogonality property.
Indeed, pick and set . We claim that . It is enough to prove
since . Now the differentiability property yields
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But we have
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hence
by monotonicity of , and the result follows.