Sharp One-bubble Critical-Point Stability and Global Compactness for the Sobolev Trace Inequality

Abstract

Let $n\ge 3$ and $1<p<n$. We first prove the local trace analogue of the sharp one-bubble critical-point stability theorem of Liu and Zhang~\cite{LiuZhang2025}: near a positive trace-bubble, the Euler--Lagrange residual controls the gradient distance to the normalized trace-bubble manifold with the sharp power $\max \{1,p-1\}$. Then, we establish a Struwe-type compactness theorem for the critical trace functional, which gives the trace counterpart of the Mercuri--Willem decomposition~\cite{MercuriWillem2010}. Combining Struwe-type compactness with the local stability estimate yields a sharp quantitative one-bubble critical-point stability theorem.

22 pages