An approximate inner ball condition characterizing $C^{1,α}$ convex bodies

Abstract

The main result of this paper uses an approximate inner ball condition to characterize $C^{1,α}$ convex bodies for $0<α\leq 1$. In particular, we show that a convex body $K$ is of class $C^{1,α}$ if and only if there exist constants $C,\varepsilon_0>0$ such that for every $0<\varepsilon\leq\varepsilon_0$ and for every $x\in\partial K$ there exists $h^\varepsilon(x)$ satisfying $B(h^\varepsilon(x), C\varepsilon^\frac{1-α}{1+α})\subset K$ and $\operatorname{dist}(x,B(h^\varepsilon(x), C\varepsilon^\frac{1-α}{1+α}))\leq\varepsilon.$ We then give a new proof of the regularity of the convex envelope by showing that $\operatorname{conv}(f)\in C^{1,α}_{\rm loc}(\mathbb{R}^n)$ whenever $f\in C^{1,α}_{\rm loc}(\mathbb{R}^n)$ and $f$ satisfies the coercivity condition $f(x)\to\infty$ as $|x|\to\infty$. Finally, we use the approximate inner ball characterization of $C^{1,α}$ convex bodies to prove that the Minkowski sum of a $C^{1,α}$ convex body and a nonempty closed convex set is a $C^{1,α}$ convex domain.