English

Generic regularity of free boundaries for the thin obstacle problem

Analysis of PDEs 2023-09-19 v2

Abstract

The free boundary for the Signorini problem in Rn+1\mathbb{R}^{n+1} is smooth outside of a degenerate set, which can have the same dimension (n1n-1) as the free boundary itself. In [FR21] it was shown that generically, the set where the free boundary is not smooth is at most (n2)(n-2)-dimensional. Our main result establishes that, in fact, the degenerate set has zero Hn3α0\mathcal{H}^{n-3-\alpha_0} measure for a generic solution. As a by-product, we obtain that, for n+14n+1 \leq 4, the whole free boundary is generically smooth. This solves the analogue of a conjecture of Schaeffer in R3\mathbb{R}^3 and R4\mathbb{R}^4 for the thin obstacle problem.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2209.01063,
  title  = {Generic regularity of free boundaries for the thin obstacle problem},
  author = {Xavier Fernández-Real and Clara Torres-Latorre},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2209.01063},
  year   = {2023}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-28T00:38:22.571Z