Lipschitz Regularity of Viscosity Solutions to the Infinity Laplace Equation ()
Keywords:

1. Introduction
In this paper, we study the Lipschitz regularity of the viscosity solutions of the Neumann problem
(1)
where Ω is a bounded
domain in
,
denotes a set of
-dimensional Euclidean space,
,
denotes the boundary of Ω,
is the unit exterior normal to the domain Ω at
,
,
are continuous in
(the closure of Ω),
is a bounded function in
and
(2)
is called the normalized infinity Laplacian.
The infinity Laplace equation
is the Euler-Lagrange equation associated with
-variational problem related to the absolutely minimizing Lipschitz extensions, which was first studied by Aronsson [1] [2] [3] [4] . The infinity Laplacian has attracted more and more attention because it is highly degenerate and has no variational structure. It has been widely used in the Monge-Kantorovich mass transfer problem in [5] , digital image processing in [6] [7] and financial mathematics in [8] .
is called the infinity Laplacian with a transport term related to tug-of-war. López, Navarro and Rossi [9] gave an explanation from the point of tug-of-war game. Let us briefly recall the game: let F be the final payoff function defined in a narrow strip around the boundary
. The tug-of-war game with a transport term is played with two stages. First the players toss an unfair coin, which has head probability
and tail probability
. If the players have obtained a head, then they toss a new (fair) coin and the winner moves the token to any new position
. But if in the first (unfair) coin toss, the players obtain a tail, the token is moved to
. Note that there is no strategies of the players involved if they get a tail in the first coin toss. The game continues until the first time the token arrives to
and then Player I earns
, Player II earns
, where F is the extension of
from
to a small strip
and gives the final payoff of the game. López, Navarro and Rossi found a viscosity solution to
(3)
where
is a Lipschitz continuous function. They obtained the existence and uniqueness of a viscosity solution by a Lp-approximation procedure when ξ is a continous gradient vector field. They also proved the stability of the unique solution with respect to ξ. In addition, when ξ is Lipschitz continuous but not necessarily a gradient, they proved that the problem (3) has a viscosity solution. Some kinds of modified tug-of-war have received a lot of attention, such as [10] - [19] .
is called the β-biased infinity Laplacian, which was first introduced by Peres, Pete and Somersille when modelling the stochastic game named biased tug-of-war in [17] . They investigated the random game with a final payoff function and a running payoff function. It’s a zero sum game with two players in which the earnings of one of them are the losses of the other. Armstrong, Smart and Somersille [20] studied the mixed Dirichlet-Neumann boundary value problem
where
is a partition of
with
nonempty and closed. They obtained existence, uniqueness and stability results for the boundary-value problem. Liu and Yang [21] established the existence of the principal Dirichlet eigenvalue based on the comparison principle. They also established the Harnack inequality and the Lipschitz regularity of a nonnegative viscosity supersolution to the β-biased equation
where
and
, the weight function
is positive in
and
. The key of their method is to choose suitable exponential cones as barrier functions.
For the case
, Lu and Wang [22] [23] studied the inhomogeneous infinity Laplace equation
They showed existence and uniqueness of the viscosity solutions of the Dirichlet problem under the intrinsic condition that g does not change its sign from the PDE's methods. Patrizi [24] studied the following Neumann problem
and showed the Lipschitz regularity in the whole
of the viscosity solutions and obtained the existence of the principal eigenvalue.
Aronsson [25] obtained the specific form of a viscosity solution to the infinity Laplace equation (
) in two-dimensional space:
. Thus, the regularity of infinity harmonic functions (viscosity solutions to
) is at most
. In [26] , the
regularity of infinity harmonic functions was proved by Savin in dimension two. Later, Evans and Savin [27] established the
regularity of infinity harmonic functions for some
in dimension two. For
, Evans and Smart [28] [29] proved that infinity harmonic functions in
are differentiable everywhere.
In this paper, we study the Lipschitz regularity of viscosity solutions of the Neumann problem (1). The main result can be summarized as the following theorem.
Theorem 1 Assume that Ω is a bounded domain of class
,
,
,
are continuous in
,
is a bounded function in
. If
is a viscosity solution of
(4)
then there exists a constant
depending on
and
such that
(5)
2. Definitions of the Viscosity Solutions
Since the normalized infinity Laplacian
is singular at the points where the gradient vanishes, we give a proper explanation to the operator by the viscosity solutions theory according to Crandall, Ishii and Lions [30] .
We denote
as the set of symmetric matrices on
and define
in
by letting
.
Denote
:
where
denotes the tensor product.
Then we get
for any
.
It is easy to check that the following properties are valid.
(1)
is homogeneous of order 0, i.e., for any
and
, one has
(2) For all
, one has
where
denotes the identity matrix in
.
(3)
is idempotent, i.e.,
Suppose that Ω is a bounded
domain. Obviously, one has the interior sphere condition and the uniform exterior sphere condition, i.e.,
(Ω1) For
, there exist
and
for which
and
.
(Ω2) For
, there exists
such that
.
From (Ω2), one has
(6)
Due to the
-regularity of Ω, we obtain the existence of a neighborhood of
in
on which the distance to the boundary
is of class
. Without loss of generality, we assume that
on
.
The
denotes the set of upper semicontinuous functions on
and the
denotes the set of lower semicontinuous functions on
. We define
. Now we give the definitions of the viscosity solutions of the Neumann problem according to [30] [31] .
Definition 1 Any function
(resp.,
) is called a viscosity subsolution (resp., viscosity supersolution) of
(7)
if the following conditions hold:
(1) For every
, for all
, such that
has a local strict maximum (resp., strict minimum) at
with
and
, one has
If
(
is a constant) in a neighborhood of
, then
(2) For every
, for all
, such that
has a local maximum (resp., minimum) at
with
and
, one has
(resp.,
)
If
(
is a constant) in a neighborhood of
in
, then
(resp.,
)
We call that
is a viscosity solution if
is both a viscosity supersolution and a viscosity subsolution.
The definition of the viscosity solutions can be also given by semijets
and
according to [32] .
Definition 2 The second-order superjet of
at
is defined to be the set
whose closure is defined as
and the second-order subjet of
at
is defined to be the set
whose closure is defined as
Next we give the definitions of viscosity solutions by semijets.
Definition 3 Any function
(resp.,
) is called a viscosity subsolution (resp., viscosity supersolution) of
if the following conditions hold:
(1) For every
,
(resp.,
) and
, one has
If
(
is a constant) in a neighborhood of
, then
(2) For every
,
(resp.,
) and
, one has
(resp.,
)
If
(
is a constant) in a neighborhood of
in
, then
(resp.,
)
We call that
is a viscosity solution if
is both a viscosity supersolution and a viscosity subsolution.
3. Lipschitz Regularity of Viscosity Solutions
In this section, we show the Lipschitz regularity of the viscosity solutions of the Neumann problem (1).
Theorem 2 Assume that Ω is a bounded domain of class
,
,
,
are continuous in
,
and
are bounded functions in
. Let
be a viscosity subsolution of
and
be a viscosity supersolution of
with
and
bounded, or
and
bounded. If
, then there exists
such that
(8)
where
depends on
and
or
.
Proof. We set
and
where
is a fixed constant,
and
are two positive constants to be chosen later.
If
, then
(9)
Define
Fix
such that
(10)
where
. If we take
large enough, there holds
Step 1. Suppose by contradiction that for each
there exists a point
such that
Here we have dropped the dependence of
on
for simplicity of notations.
If
, we obtain that
is non-negative in
and
by the inequality (9). Then
.
Clearly
. For any
with
, we get
Thus,
.
Next we compute the derivatives of
at
,
and
For large
, one has
(11)
and
(12)
By the inequality (6), if
, one has
where
is the radius in the uniform exterior sphere condition (Ω2) and we have chosen
.
Similarly, if
, one has
Since
is a viscosity subsolution and
is a viscosity supersolution, we obtain
and
Then the inequalities (11) and (12) hold for any maximum point
, provided
is large enough.
Step 2. For every
, there exist
such that
,
and
(13)
Next we estimate the right-hand side of the inequality (13):
We denote
One has
(14)
and
(15)
Indeed, for
, we have
where
denotes various positive constants independent of
.
Now we are ready to estimate A3. For
, one has
and the Hessian matrix of
is
(16)
Denoting
(17)
we obtain
(18)
where
By the inequalities (14), (15), (18) and
one obtains
(19)
where
Thus, we can rewrite the inequality (19) as
(20)
where
,
.
Multiplying on the left of the inequality (20) by the non-negative symmetric matrix
one has
(21)
We aim to get the estimate on the right side of the inequality (21). Next we define
and compute
. Since
is idempotent, one has
For large
, since
and
, we get
Thus, we can write
as
where
and
Therefore,
Since
, for large
, one has
and
Then
and
We conclude that
Similarly, we can get the following estimate
Therefore, by the inequality (21) one has
Step 3. By the definition of
and
and the fact that
,
are respectively viscosity subsolution and viscosity supersolution, one has
According to the inequalities (11) and (12), one gets
(22)
If
and
are both bounded, the left-hand side of the inequality (22) is bounded from below by
. Otherwise, if
is non-negative and bounded, then
and that quantity is greater than
. On the other hand, the right-hand side of the inequality (22) goes to
as
. Hence, taking
large enough, we can obtain a contradiction and this concludes the proof.
Theorem 1 is an immediate consequence of Theorem 2.
Proof of Theorem 1. Since
is a viscosity solution of the problem (4),
is both a viscosity subsolution and a viscosity supersolution of the problem (4). Thus, we have
. Since
is bounded, by Theorem 2, we can get immediately the Lipschizt estimate (5).
4. Conclusion
In this paper, we establish the Lipschitz regularity of the problem (1) arsing from the generalized random tug-of-war game. The Lipschitz regularity is an indispensable part and an important issue in the study of PDEs. The Lipschitz regularity also plays a vital role in applications, such as image processing, financial problems and physical engineering.
Acknowledgements
We thank the anonymous referees for the careful reading of the manuscript and useful suggestions and comments.