Partial Balayage and Related Concepts in Potential Theory

This thesis consists of three papers, all treating various aspects of the operation partial balayage from potential theory. The first paper concerns the equilibrium measure in the setting of two dimensional weighted potential theory, an important measure arising in various mathematical areas, e.g. random matrix theory and the theory of orthogonal polynomials. In this paper we show that the equilibrium measure satisfies a complementary relation with a partial balayage measure if the weight function is of a certain type. The second paper treats the connection between partial balayage measures and measures arising from scaling limits of a generalisation of the so-called divisible sandpile model on lattices. The standard divisible sandpile can, in a natural way, be considered a discrete version of the partial balayage operation with respect to the Lebesgue measure. The generalisation that is developed in this paper is essentially a discrete version of the partial balayage operation with respect to more general measures than the Lebesgue measure. In the third paper we develop a version of partial balayage on Riemannian manifolds, using the theory of currents. Several known properties of partial balayage measures are shown to have corresponding results in the Riemannian manifold setting, one of which being the main result of the first paper. Moreover, we utilize the developed framework to show that for manifolds of dimension two, harmonic and geodesic balls are locally equivalent if and only if the manifold locally has constant curvature.