Abstract

This is a joint work with Nunzia Gavitone, Alba Lia Masiello and Giorgio Poggesi. It is well known that there is a deep connection between Serrin’s symmetry result—dealing with overdetermined problems involving the Laplacian—and the celebrated Alexandrov’s Soap Bubble Theorem (SBT)—stating that, if the mean curvature H of the boundary of a smooth bounded connected open set  is constant, then the set  must be a ball.We want to extend the study of such a connection to the broader case of overdetermined problems for Hessian operators and constant higher order mean curvature boundaries. Our analysis will not only provide new proofs of the higher order SBT (originally established by Alexandrov) and of the symmetry for overdetermined Serrin-type problems for Hessian equations (originally established by Brandolini, Nitsch, Salani, and Trombetti), but also bring several benefits, including new interesting symmetry results and quantitative stability estimates.