Characterizing Sobolev Homeomorphic Extensions via Internal Distances

We give a full characterization of embeddings of the unit circle that admit a Sobolev homeomorphic extension to the unit disk. As a direct corollary, we establish that for quasiconvex target domains $\mathbb Y$, any homeomorphism $\varphi \colon \partial \mathbb{D} \to \partial \mathbb Y$ that admits a continuous $W^{1,p}$-extension to the unit disk $\mathbb{D}$ also admits a $W^{1,p}$-homeomorphic extension. These Sobolev variants of the classical Jordan-Sch\"onflies theorem are essential for ensuring the well-posedness of variational problems arising in Nonlinear Elasticity and Geometric Function Theory.