Stability of Bernstein’s Theorem and Soft Doubling for Vector Gaussian Channels

The stability of Bernstein’s characterization of Gaussian distributions is extended to vectors by utilizing characteristic functions. Stability is used to develop a soft doubling argument that establishes the optimality of Gaussian vectors for certain communications channels with additive Gaussian noise, including two-receiver broadcast channels. One novelty is that the argument does not require the existence of distributions that achieve capacity.