Optimal convex shapes for concave functionals

Abstract: Motivated by a long-standing conjecture of Polya and Szeg\"o about the Newtonian capacity of convex bodies, we discuss the role of concavity inequalities in shape optimization, and we provide several counterexamples to the Blaschke-concavity of variational functionals, including capacity. We then introduce a new algebraic structure on convex bodies, which allows to obtain global concavity and indecomposability results, and we discuss their application to isoperimetriclike inequalities. As a byproduct of this approach we also obtain a quantitative version of the Kneser-S\"uss inequality. Finally, for a large class of functionals involving Dirichlet energies and the surface measure, we perform a local analysis of strictly convex portions of the boundary via second order shape derivatives. This allows in particular to exclude the presence of smooth regions with positive Gauss curvature in an optimal shape for Polya-Szeg\"o problem.