Boundedness of Wolff-type potentials and applications to PDEs

We provide a short proof of a sharp rearrangement estimate for a generalized version of a potential of Wolff–Havin–Maz’ya type. As a consequence, we prove a reduction principle for that integral operators, that is, a characterization of those rearrangement invariant spaces between which the potentials are bounded via a one-dimensional inequality of Hardy-type. Since the special case of the mentioned potential is known to control precisely very weak solutions to a broad class of quasilinear elliptic PDEs of non-standard growth, we infer the local regularity properties of the solutions in rearrangement invariant spaces for prescribed classes of data.