Quantitative stability of the free boundary in the obstacle problem

Abstract: We prove some detailed quantitative stability results for the contact set and the solution of the classical obstacle problem in $\mathbb{R}^n$ ($n \ge 2$) under perturbations of the obstacle function, which is also equivalent to studying the variation of the equilibrium measure in classical potential theory under a perturbation of the external field. To do so, working in the setting of the whole space, we examine the evolution of the free boundary $\Gamma^t$ corresponding to the boundary of the contact set for a family of obstacle functions $h^t$. Assuming that $h=h^t (x) = h(t,x)$ is $C^{k+1,\alpha}$ in $[-1,1]\times \mathbb{R}^n$ and that the initial free boundary $\Gamma^0$ is regular, we prove that $\Gamma^t$ is twice differentiable in $t$ in a small neighborhood of $t=0$. Moreover, we show that the "normal velocity" and the "normal acceleration" of $\Gamma^t$ are respectively $C^{k-1,\alpha}$ and $C^{k-2,\alpha}$ scalar fields on $\Gamma^t$. This is accomplished by deriving equations for these velocity and acceleration and studying the regularity of their solutions via single and double layers estimates from potential theory.