An exceptional property of the one-dimensional Bianchi–Egnell inequality.

In this paper, for d ≥ 1 and s ∈ (0 , d 2) , we study the Bianchi–Egnell quotient Q (f) = inf f ∈ H ˙ s (R d) \ B ‖ (- Δ) s / 2 f ‖ L 2 (R d) 2 - S d , s ‖ f ‖ L 2 d d - 2 s (R d) 2 dist H ˙ s (R d) (f , B) 2 , f ∈ H ˙ s (R d) \ B , where S d , s is the best Sobolev constant and B is the manifold of Sobolev optimizers. By a fine asymptotic analysis, we prove that when d = 1 , there is a neighborhood of B on which the quotient Q (f) is larger than the lowest value attainable by sequences converging to B . This behavior is surprising because it is contrary to the situation in dimension d ≥ 2 described recently in König (Bull Lond Math Soc 55(4):2070–2075, 2023). This leads us to conjecture that for d = 1 , Q (f) has no minimizer on H ˙ s (R d) \ B , which again would be contrary to the situation in d ≥ 2 . As a complement of the above, we study a family of test functions which interpolates between one and two Talenti bubbles, for every d ≥ 1 . For d ≥ 2 , this family yields an alternative proof of the main result of König (Bull Lond Math Soc 55(4):2070–2075, 2023). For d = 1 we make some numerical observations which support the conjecture stated above. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]