Displacement convexity and minimal fronts at phase boundaries
Functional Analysis
2009-11-13 v2 Mathematical Physics
math.MP
Abstract
We show that certain free energy functionals that are not convex with respect to the usual convex structure on their domain of definition, are strictly convex in the sense of displacement convexity under a natural change of variables. We use this to show that in certain cases, the only critical points of these functionals are minimizers. This approach based on displacement convexity permits us to treat multicomponent systems as well as single component systems. The developments produce new examples of displacement convex functionals, and, in the multi-component setting, jointly displacement convex functionals.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.0706.0133,
title = {Displacement convexity and minimal fronts at phase boundaries},
author = {Eric A. Carlen and Maria C. Carvalho and Raffaele Esposito and Joel L. Lebowitz and Rossana Marra},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0706.0133},
year = {2009}
}