Pointwise bounds on Dirichlet Green's functions for a singular drift term

Abstract

We introduce a technique to obtain pointwise upper and lower bounds for the Green's function of elliptic operators whose principal part is the Laplacian and that include a drift term diverging near the boundary like a power of the inverse distance with exponent less than 1, in the unit ball B(0,1) \subset \mathbb{R}^n, n \ge 3. The constants in the upper estimates are uniform in B(0,r) for each r < 1, with explicit dependence on r. The drift here belongs to C^{1,\alpha}_{\mathrm{loc}} and may, more generally, be majorized by a function radially integrable up to the boundary. These appear to be the first such estimates for non-coercive drifts and remain new even for smooth drifts, suggesting extensions to singular potentials and other settings where energy methods fail.