Monotonicity formulas in positively curved settings with applications to two-phase free boundary problems

Abstract: Inspired by the monotonicity formula of Alt, Caffarelli, and Friedman, we consider a natural variant of the ACF functional in positively curved 2-dimensional settings where we integrate over sublevel sets of Green's function rather than disks. We prove sharp almost-monotonicity formulas for our new functional in the case of convex planar domains (both with the pole on the boundary and in the interior) and in the setting of 2-dimensional complete manifolds with Euclidean volume growth and nonnegative Gaussian curvature. The tools include the Schwarz-Christoffel formula and Riesz decomposition using conformal coordinates. As a consequence, using quasiconformal estimates, we give a new Lipschitz bound in the manifold setting for minimizers of the two-phase free boundary problem of Alt, Caffarelli, and Friedman, with the constant depending on only the total integral curvature, in contrast to work of Teixeira and Zhang, which gives constants depending on pointwise bounds for the Riemann curvature tensor and its derivatives. Our methods also recover the Lipschitz bound up to a Neumann boundary of Gemmer, Moon, and Raynor in the planar convex domain case.