The Euclidean mixed isoperimetric-isodiametric inequality states that the
round ball maximizes the volume under constraint on the product between
boundary area and radius. The goal of the paper is to investigate such
mixed isoperimetric-isodiametric inequalities in Riemannian manifolds. We
first prove that the same inequality, with the sharp Euclidean constants,
holds on Cartan–Hadamard spaces as well as on minimal submanifolds of
. The
equality cases are also studied and completely characterized; in particular,
the latter gives a new link with free-boundary minimal submanifolds in a
Euclidean ball. We also consider the case of manifolds with nonnegative Ricci
curvature and prove a new comparison result stating that metric balls in
the manifold have product of boundary area and radius bounded by the
Euclidean counterpart and equality holds if and only if the ball is actually
Euclidean.
We then consider the problem of the existence of optimal shapes (i.e., regions
minimizing the product of boundary area and radius under the constraint of having
fixed enclosed volume), called here isoperimetric-isodiametric regions. While it
is not difficult to show existence if the ambient manifold is compact, the
situation changes dramatically if the manifold is not compact: indeed we
give examples of spaces where there exists no isoperimetric-isodiametric
region (e.g., minimal surfaces with planar ends and more generally
-locally
asymptotic Euclidean Cartan–Hadamard manifolds), and we prove that on the other hand
on
-locally
asymptotic Euclidean manifolds with nonnegative Ricci curvature there exists an
isoperimetric-isodiametric region for every positive volume (this class of spaces
includes a large family of metrics playing a key role in general relativity and Ricci
flow: the so-called Hawking gravitational instantons and the Bryant-type Ricci
solitons).
Finally we prove the optimal regularity of the boundary of isoperimetric-isodiametric
regions: in the part which does not touch a minimal enclosing ball, the boundary is a
smooth hypersurface outside of a closed subset of Hausdorff codimension
,
and in a neighborhood of the contact region, the boundary is a
hypersurface with
explicit estimates on the
norm of the mean curvature.