English

Regularity of Minimizers of a Tensor-valued Variational Obstacle Problem in Three Dimensions

Analysis of PDEs 2019-12-19 v2

Abstract

Motivated by Ball and Majumdar's modification of Landau-de Gennes model for nematic liquid crystals, we study energy-minimizer QQ of a tensor-valued variational obstacle problem in a bounded 3-D domain with prescribed boundary data. The energy functional is designed to blow up as QQ approaches the obstacle. Under certain assumptions, especially on blow-up profile of the singular bulk potential, we prove higher interior regularity of QQ, and show that the contact set of QQ is either empty, or small with characterization of its Hausdorff dimension. We also prove boundary partial regularity of the energy-minimizer.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1908.10889,
  title  = {Regularity of Minimizers of a Tensor-valued Variational Obstacle Problem in Three Dimensions},
  author = {Zhiyuan Geng and Jiajun Tong},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1908.10889},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

We added the detailed proof of the two inequalities (2.25) in the Appendix. Also, for the log potential, we proposed a weaker assumption (1.12) which is satisfied by the Ball-Majumdar bulk potential. We also modify the result (1.19) and the proof (Page 18) of the second part of Theorem 1.4 accordingly