Continuous Harmonic Functions on a Ball that are not in $$H^s$$ for $$s>1/2$$

Abstract We show that there are harmonic functions on a ball $${\mathbb {B}_n}$$ <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> <mml:msub> <mml:mi>B</mml:mi> <mml:mi>n</mml:mi> </mml:msub> </mml:math> of $$\mathbb {R}^n$$ <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> <mml:msup> <mml:mrow> <mml:mi>R</mml:mi> </mml:mrow> <mml:mi>n</mml:mi> </mml:msup> </mml:math> , $$n\ge 2$$ <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> <mml:mrow> <mml:mi>n</mml:mi> <mml:mo>≥</mml:mo> <mml:mn>2</mml:mn> </mml:mrow> </mml:math> , that are continuous, and even Hölder continuous, up to the boundary but not in the Sobolev space $$H^s(\mathbb {B}_n)$$ <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> <mml:mrow> <mml:msup> <mml:mi>H</mml:mi> <mml:mi>s</mml:mi> </mml:msup> <mml:mrow> <mml:mo>(</mml:mo> <mml:msub> <mml:mi>B</mml:mi> <mml:mi>n</mml:mi> </mml:msub> <mml:mo>)</mml:mo> </mml:mrow> </mml:mrow> </mml:math> for s bigger than a certain sharp bound. The idea for the construction is inspired by the two-dimensional example of a harmonic continuous function with infinite energy presented by Hadamard in 1906. To obtain examples in any dimension $$n\ge 2$$ <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> <mml:mrow> <mml:mi>n</mml:mi> <mml:mo>≥</mml:mo> <mml:mn>2</mml:mn> </mml:mrow> </mml:math> we exploit certain series of spherical harmonics.