Smooth Failure of Boundary Unique Continuation for Harmonic Functions

Abstract

For every $n\ge 3$, we construct a nonconstant real-valued function $U\in C^{\infty }(\overline{{\mathbb{R}}_{+}^n})$, harmonic in the upper half-space, whose complete boundary jet vanishes on a compact nowhere dense subset of $\partial {\mathbb{R}}_{+}^n$ of positive $(n-1)$-dimensional measure. The essential construction takes place in two dimensions and yields the case $n=3$; higher-dimensional examples follow by cylindrical lifting. In every dimension, the exceptional set may occupy an arbitrarily large proportion of a fixed boundary cube. This resolves, in the negative, the smooth case of the boundary unique-continuation problem left open by Bourgain and Wolff in 1990 \cite[p.~260]{BourgainWolff1990}. In dimension three, a Möbius--Kelvin transfer gives the corresponding counterexample in the unit ball. It disproves Nadirashvili's smooth unit-ball conjecture on boundary singular sets \cite[Conjecture~4, p.~232]{Nadirashvili1997} and, a fortiori, disproves the gradient-only formulation subsequently recorded by Logunov and Malinnikova \cite[Section~7.4]{LogunovMalinnikova2020} and by Lin \cite[Conjecture~3, pp.~15--16]{Lin2020Current}. The proof uncovers a hidden flexibility principle for nonlocal elliptic equations: microscopic modifications can exert macroscopic control over exterior data. A quantitative correction mechanism for the half-Laplacian, iterated across scales, produces flat nonlocal Cauchy data on a set of positive measure. Thus nonlocality has a striking dual character: the same long-range interaction that drives unique-continuation rigidity can also furnish the flexibility through which that rigidity fails in the smooth category.