Quantitative immersability of Riemann metrics and the infinite hierarchy of prestrained shell models

This paper concerns the variational description of prestrained materials, in the context of dimension reduction for thin films $\Omega^h=\omega\times (-\frac{h}{2}, \frac{h}{2})$. Given a Riemann metric $G$ on $\Omega^1$, we study the question of what is the infimum of the averaged pointwise deficit of a given immersion from being an orientation-preserving isometric immersion of $G_{\mid \Omega^h}$ on $\Omega^h,$ over all weakly regular immersions. This deficit is measured by the non-Euclidean energies $\mathcal{E}^h$, which can be seen as modifications of the classical nonlinear three-dimensional elasticity. Building on our previous results, we complete the scaling analysis of $\mathcal{E}^h$ and the derivation of $\Gamma$-limits of the scaled energies $h^{-2n}\mathcal{E}^h$, for all $n\geq 1$. We show the energy quantisation in the sense that the even powers $2n$ of $h$ are indeed the only possible ones (all of them are also attained). For each $n$, we identify the equivalent conditions for the validity of the corresponding scaling, in terms of the vanishing of appropriate Riemann curvatures of $G$ to certain orders, and in terms of the matched isometry expansions. We also establish the asymptotic behaviour of the minimizing immersions as $h\to 0$.