Hölder regularity of the normal distance with an application to a PDE model for growing sandpiles

Given a bounded domain in with smooth boundary, the cut locus is the closure of the set of nondifferentiability points of the distance from the boundary of . The normal distance to the cut locus, , is the map which measures the length of the line segment joining to the cut locus along the normal direction , whenever . Recent results show that this map, restricted to boundary points, is Lipschitz continuous, as long as the boundary of is of class . Our main result is the global Hölder regularity of in the case of a domain with analytic boundary. We will also show that the regularity obtained is optimal, as soon as the set of the so-called regular conjugate points is nonempty. In all the other cases, Lipschitz continuity can be extended to the whole domain . The above regularity result for is also applied to derive the Hölder continuity of the solution of a system of partial differential equations that arises in granular matter theory and optimal mass transfer.