Variations on the capacitary inradius

Abstract

We discuss some properties of the capacitary inradius for an open set. This is an extension of the classical concept of inradius (i.e. the radius of a largest inscribed ball), which takes into account capacitary effects. Its introduction dates back to the pioneering works of Vladimir Maz’ya. We present some variants of this object and their mutual relations, as well as their connections with Poincaré inequalities. We also show that, under a mild regularity assumption on the boundary of the sets, the capacitary inradius is equivalent to the classical inradius. This comes with an explicit estimate and it permits to get a Buser–type inequality for a large class of open sets, whose boundaries may have power-like cusps of arbitrary order. Finally, we present a couple of open problems.