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We study global solutions to the thin obstacle problem with at most quadratic growth at infinity. We show that every ellipsoid can be realized as the contact set of such a solution. On the other hand, if such a solution has a compact contact set, we show that it must be an ellipsoid., Comment: A uniqueness result is added to Theorem 1.1, thanks to the suggestion of one referee. Funding information is added

The characterization of global solutions to the obstacle problems in $\mathbb{R}^N$, or equivalently of null quadrature domains, has been studied over more than 90 years. In this paper we give a conclusive answer to this problem by proving the following long-standing conjecture: The coincidence set of a global solution to the obstacle problem is either a half-space, an ellipsoid, a paraboloid, or a cylinder with an ellipsoid or a paraboloid as base.

We prove the -- to the best knowledge of the authors -- first result on the fine asymptotic behavior of the regular part of the free boundary of the obstacle problem close to singularities. The result is motivated by our recent partial answer to a long standing conjecture and the first partial classification of global solutions of the obstacle problem with unbounded coincidence sets in higher dimensions., Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:2005.04915

In this paper we give a full classification of global solutions of the obstacle problem for the fractional Laplacian (including the thin obstacle problem) with compact coincidence set and at most polynomial growth in dimension $N \geq 3$. We do this in terms of a bijection onto a set of polynomials describing the asymptotics of the solution. Furthermore we prove that coincidence sets of global solutions that are compact are also convex if the solution has at most quadratic growth.

Motivated by the almost completely open problem of characterizing unbounded coincidence sets of global solutions of the classical obstacle problem in higher dimensions, we give in this note a concise and easy-to-extend proof of the known fact that if the coincidence set $\{u=0 \}$ of a global solution $u$ is bounded with nonempty interior then it is an ellipsoid.

Assuming a lower bound on the dimension, we prove a long standing conjecture concerning the classification of global solutions of the obstacle problem with unbounded coincidence sets.