A new symmetry criterion based on the distance function and applications to PDE's

Abstract: We prove that, if $\Omega\subset \mathbb{R}^n$ is an open bounded starshaped domain of class $C^2$, the constancy over $\partial \Omega$ of the function $$\varphi(y) = \int_0^{\lambda(y)} \prod_{j=1}^{n-1}[1-t \kappa_j(y)]\, dt$$ implies that $\Omega$ is a ball. Here $k_j(y)$ and $\lambda(y)$ denote respectively the principal curvatures and the cut value of a boundary point $y \in \partial \Omega$. We apply this geometric result to different symmetry questions for PDE's: an overdetermined system of Monge-Kantorovich type equations (which can be viewed as the limit as $p \to + \infty$ of Serrin's symmetry problem for the $p$-Laplacian), and equations in divergence form whose solutions depend only on the distance from the boundary in some subset of their domain.