Sharp Hessian integrability for fully nonlinear elliptic supersolutions in low dimensions

Abstract

We settle the planar sharp Hessian-integrability conjecture of Armstrong, Silvestre, and Smart [\emph{Comm. Pure Appl. Math.} \textbf{65} (2012), 1169--1184] for viscosity supersolutions of fully nonlinear uniformly elliptic equations. If $\kappa =\Lambda /\lambda$, then the optimal exponent in the $W^{2,\epsilon }$ regularity theory in the plane is exactly $${\epsilon }_2(\kappa )=\frac{2}{\kappa +1}.$$ The same mechanism reaches the known upper obstruction in dimension three throughout the full range $1\le \kappa \le 4$ and therefore gives $${\epsilon }_3(\kappa )=\frac{3}{2\kappa +1}(1\le \kappa \le 4).$$ Beyond this threshold, it yields a closed algebraic lower bound and identifies the precise spectral configuration responsible for the remaining gap. The proof introduces a spectrally resolved continuum-in-opening mechanism for contact geometry. Throughout the contact evolution, the vertex Jacobian retains the negative index of the Hessian and its mean negative curvature---data erased by the classical pointwise reduction---and these variables are optimized only after integration over all openings. This reduces the analysis to a finite family of explicit one-dimensional kernels whose critical exponents recover the sharp planar threshold, identify the exact three-dimensional regime above, and expose a broader principle for extracting second-order regularity from the spectral geometry of contact sets.

26 pages