Improved Moser–Trudinger inequality of Tintarev type in dimension n and the existence of its extremal functions

Abstract

Let \(\Omega \) be a smooth bounded domain in \(\mathbb R^n\) with \(n\ge 2\), \(W^{1,n}_0(\Omega )\) be the usual Sobolev space on \(\Omega \) and define \(\lambda _1(\Omega ) = \inf \nolimits _{u\in W^{1,n}_0(\Omega )\setminus \{0\}}\frac{\int _\Omega |\nabla u|^n \mathrm{d}x}{\int _\Omega |u|^n \mathrm{d}x}\). Based on the blow-up analysis method, we shall establish the following improved Moser–Trudinger inequality of Tintarev type $$\begin{aligned} \sup _{u\in W^{1,n}_0(\Omega ), \int _\Omega |\nabla u|^n \mathrm{{d}}x-\alpha \int _\Omega |u|^n \mathrm{{d}}x \le 1} \int _\Omega \exp (\alpha _{n} |u|^{\frac{n}{n-1}}) \mathrm{{d}}x < \infty , \end{aligned}$$ for any \(0 \le \alpha < \lambda _1(\Omega )\), where \(\alpha _{n} = n \omega _{n-1}^{\frac{1}{n-1}}\) with \(\omega _{n-1}\) being the surface area of the unit sphere in \(\mathbb R^n\). This inequality is stronger than the improved Moser–Trudinger inequality obtained by Adimurthi and Druet (Differ Equ 29:295–322, 2004) in dimension 2 and by Yang (J Funct Anal 239:100–126, 2006) in higher dimension and extends a result of Tintarev (J Funct Anal 266:55–66, 2014) in dimension 2 to higher dimension. We also prove that the supremum above is attained for any \(0< \alpha < \lambda _{1}(\Omega )\). (The case \(\alpha =0\) corresponding to the Moser–Trudinger inequality is well known.)