English

Rectifiability of entropy productions for weak solutions of the 2D eikonal equation with supercritical regularity

Analysis of PDEs 2025-09-23 v1

Abstract

Weak solutions m ⁣:ΩR2R2m\colon\Omega\subset\mathbb{R}^2\to\mathbb{R}^2 of the eikonal equation \begin{align*} |m|=1\text{ a.e. and }\mathrm{div}\: m =0\,, \end{align*} arise naturally as sharp interface limits of bounded energy configurations in various physically motivated models, including the Aviles-Giga energy. The distributions μΦ=divΦ(m)\mu_\Phi=\mathrm{div}\,\Phi(m), defined for a class of smooth vector fields Φ\Phi called entropies, carry information about singularities and energy cost. If these entropy productions are Radon measures, a long-standing conjecture predicts that they must be concentrated on the 1-rectifiable jump set of mm, as they do if mm has bounded variation (BV) thanks to the chain rule. We establish this concentration property, for a large class of entropies, under the Besov regularity assumption \begin{align*} m\in B^{1/p}_{p,\infty} \quad \Leftrightarrow \quad \sup_{h\in \mathbb R^2\setminus\lbrace 0\rbrace} \frac{\|m(\cdot +h)-m\|_{L^p }}{|h|^{1/p}} <\infty\,, \end{align*} for any 1p<31\leq p<3, thus going well beyond the BV setting (p=1p=1) and leaving only the borderline case p=3p=3 open.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2509.16692,
  title  = {Rectifiability of entropy productions for weak solutions of the 2D eikonal equation with supercritical regularity},
  author = {Xavier Lamy and Elio Marconi},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2509.16692},
  year   = {2025}
}