Motivated by the almost completely open problem of characterizing unbounded coincidence sets of global solutions of the classical obstacle problem in higher dimensions, we give in this note a concise and easy-to-extend proof of the known fact that if the coincidence set $\{u=0 \}$ of a global solution $u$ is bounded with nonempty interior then it is an ellipsoid.
In this paper we give a full classification of global solutions of the obstacle problem for the fractional Laplacian (including the thin obstacle problem) with compact coincidence set and at most polynomial growth in dimension $N \geq 3$. We do this in terms of a bijection onto a set of polynomials describing the asymptotics of the solution. Furthermore we prove that coincidence sets of global solutions that are compact are also convex if the solution has at most quadratic growth.
Assuming a lower bound on the dimension, we prove a long standing conjecture concerning the classification of global solutions of the obstacle problem with unbounded coincidence sets.
We consider a parabolic obstacle problem for Euler's elastic energy of graphs with fixed ends. We show global existence, well-posedness and subconvergence provided that the obstacle and the initial datum are suitably 'small'. For symmetric cone obstacles we can improve the subconvergence to convergence. Qualitative aspects such as energy dissipation, coincidence with the obstacle and time regularity are also examined.
Global solutions to the fully nonlinear obstacle problem
School of Mathematics and Statistics, Shaanxi Normal University(陕西师范大学数学与统计学院);School of Mathematics and Statistics, Xi’an Jiaotong University(西安交通大学数学与统计学院)
We study the homogenization of obstacle problems in Orlicz-Sobolev spaces for a wide class of monotone operators (possibly degenerate or singular) of the $p(\cdot)$-Laplacian type. Our approach is based on the Lewy-Stampacchia inequalities, which then give access to a compactness argument. We also prove the convergence of the coincidence sets under non-degeneracy conditions.
We consider an oscillatory obstacle problem where the coincidence set and free boundary are also highly oscillatory. We establish a rate of convergence for a regularized notion of free boundary to the free boundary of a corresponding classical obstacle problem, assuming the latter is regular. The convergence rate is linear in the minimal length scale determined by the fine properties of a corrector function.
The characterization of global solutions to the obstacle problems in $\mathbb{R}^N$, or equivalently of null quadrature domains, has been studied over more than 90 years. In this paper we give a conclusive answer to this problem by proving the following long-standing conjecture: The coincidence set of a global solution to the obstacle problem is either a half-space, an ellipsoid, a paraboloid, or a cylinder with an ellipsoid or a paraboloid as base.
We consider the problem of constrained Ginibre ensemble with prescribed portion of eigenvalues on a given curve $Γ\subset \mathbb R^2$ and relate it to a thin obstacle problem. The key step in the proof is the $H^1$ estimate for the logarithmic potential of the equilibrium measure. The coincidence set has two components: one in $Γ$ and another one in $\mathbb R^2\setminus Γ$ which are well separated. Our main result here asserts that this obstacle problem is well posed in $H^1(\mathbb R^2)$ which improves previous results in $H^1_{loc}(\mathbb R^2)$.
The paper is concerned with a free boundary problem generated by the biharmonic operator and an obstacle. The main goal is to deduce a fully guaranteed upper bound of the difference between the exact minimizer u and any function (approximation) from the corresponding energy class (which consists of the functions in $H^2$ satisfying the prescribed boundary conditions and the restrictions stipulated by the obstacle). For this purpose we use the duality method of the calculus of variations and general type error identities earlier derived for a wide class of convex variational problems. By this m…
In this article we use flatness improvement argument to study the regularity of the free boundary for the biharmonic obstacle problem with zero obstacle. Assuming that the solution is almost one-dimensional, and that the non-coincidence set is an non-tangentially accessible (NTA) domain, we derive the $C^{1,α}$-regularity of the free boundary in a small ball centered at the origin. From the $C^{1,α}$-regularity of the free boundary we conclude that the solution to the biharmonic obstacle problem is locally $ C^{3,α}$ up to the free boundary, and therefore $C^{2,1} $. In the end we study an exa…
In this article we study a normalised double obstacle problem with polynomial obstacles $ p^1\leq p^2$ under the assumption that $ p^1(x)=p^2(x)$ iff $ x=0$. In dimension two we give a complete characterisation of blow-up solutions depending on the coefficients of the polynomials $p^1, p^2$. In particular, we see that there exists a new type of blow-ups, that we call double-cone solutions since the coincidence sets $\{u=p^1\}$ and $\{u=p^2\}$ are cones with a common vertex. We prove the uniqueness of blow-up limits, and analyse the regularity of the free boundary in dimension two. In particula…
We extend basic regularity of the free boundary of the obstacle problem to some classes of heterogeneous quasilinear elliptic operators with variable growth that includes, in particular, the $p(x)$-Laplacian. Under the assumption of Lipschitz continuity of the order of the power growth $p(x)>1$, we use the growth rate of the solution near the free boundary to obtain its porosity, which implies that the free boundary is of Lebesgue measure zero for $p(x)$-Laplacian type heterogeneous obstacle problems. Under additional assumptions on the operator heterogeneities and on data we show, in two diff…
The paper is concerned with a class of nonlinear free boundary problems, which are usually solved by variational methods based on primal (or primal-dual) variational settings. We deduce and investigate special relations (error identities). They show that a certain nonlinear measure of the distance to the exact solution (specific for each problem) is equivalent to the respective duality gap, which minimization is a keystone of all variational numerical methods. Therefore, the identity defines the measure that contains maximal quantitative information on the quality of a numerical solution avail…
A rigidity result for a global vectorial free boundary problem with a linear datum
Dipartimento di Matematica Universita di Pisa(比萨大学数学系);Centro di Ricerca Matematica Ennio De Giorgi Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa(比萨高等师范学校恩尼奥·德乔治数学研究中心)
In this article we consider the problem of finding the visibility set from a given point when the obstacles are represented as the level set of a given function. Although the visibility set can be computed efficiently by ray tracing, there are advantages to using a level set representation for the obstacles, and to characterizing the solution using a Partial Differential Equation (PDE). A nonlocal PDE formulation was proposed in Tsai et. al. (Journal of Computational Physics 199(1):260-290, 2004): in this article we propose a simpler PDE formulation, involving a nonlinear obstacle problem. We …