Sharp quantitative Faber-Krahn inequalities and the Alt-Caffarelli-Friedman monotonicity formula

The objective of this paper is two-fold. First, we establish new sharp quantitative estimates for Faber-Krahn inequalities on simply connected space forms. In these spaces, geodesic balls uniquely minimize the first eigenvalue of the Dirichlet Laplacian among all sets of a fixed volume. We prove that the gap between the first eigenvalue of a given set and that of the ball quantitatively controls both the L^1 distance of this set from a ball and the L^2 distance between the corresponding eigenfunctions. On Euclidean space, this extends a result of Brasco-De Phillipis-Velichkov; the eigenfunction control largely builds upon new regularity results for minimizers of critically perturbed Alt-Cafarelli type functionals in our companion paper. On the round sphere and hyperbolic space, the present results are the first sharp quantitative results with respect to any distance; here the local portion of the analysis is based on new implicit spectral analysis techniques.

Second, we apply these sharp quantitative Faber-Krahn inequalities in order to establish a quantitative form of the Alt-Caffarelli-Friedman (ACF) monotonicity formula. A powerful tool in the study of free boundary problems, the ACF monotonicity formula is nonincreasing with respect to its scaling parameter for any pair of admissible subharmonic functions, and is constant if and only if the pair comprises two linear functions truncated to complementary half planes. We show that the energy drop in the ACF monotonicity formula from one scale to the next controls how close a pair of admissible functions is from a pair of complementary half-plane solutions. In particular, when the square root of the energy drop summed over all scales is small, our result implies the existence of tangents (unique blowups) of these functions.