Related papers: Sphere-valued harmonic maps with surface energy an…

We study 2d vortex sheets with unbounded support. First we show a version of the Biot- Savart law related to a class of objects including such vortex sheets. Next, we give a formula associating the kinetic energy of a very general class of…

In the density functional (DF) theory of Kohn and Sham, the kinetic energy of the ground state of a system of noninteracting electrons in a general external field is calculated using a set of orbitals. Orbital free methods attempt to…

The Landau-de Gennes energy in nematic liquid crystals depends on four elastic constants $L_1$, $L_2$, $L_3$, $L_4$. In the case of $L_4\neq 0$, Ball and Majumdar (Mol. Cryst. Liq. Cryst., 2010) found an example that the original Landau-de…

We study the regularity of local minimisers of a prototypical free-discontinuity problem involving both a manifold-valued constraint on the maps (which are defined on a bounded domain $\Omega \subset \R^2$) and a variable-exponent growth in…

In this paper, we deal with an obstacle placement problem inside a disk, that can be formulated as an energy minimization problem with respect to the rotations of the obstacle about its center, with respect to the translations of the…

We study the restricted motion of an electric charge in a spherical surface in the field of a magnetic dipole. This is the classical non-relativistic St\"oermer problem within a sphere, with the dipole in its centre. We start from a…

The purpose of this paper is to develop a general existence theory for constrained minimization problems for functionals defined on function spaces on metric measure spaces $(\mathcal M, d, \mu)$. We apply this theory to functionals defined…

We prove localized energy estimates for the wave equation in domains with a strictly concave boundary when homogeneous Dirichlet or Neumann conditions are imposed. By restricting the solution to small, frequency dependent, space time…

We study vector minimizers u of the Allen-Cahn functional with potentials possessing N global minima defined on bounded domains, with certain geometrical features and Dirichlet conditions on the boundary. We derive a sharp lower bound for…

Let $\Omega \subset {R}^n,$ $n \geq 3,$ be a bounded open set, $x=(x_1,x_2,\ldots,x_n)$ a generic point which belongs to $\Omega,$ $u \colon \Omega \to {R}^N ,$ $N>1,$ and $ Du=(D_\alpha u^i)$, $D_\alpha = \partial/\partial x_\alpha, $…

In this article we study lower semicontinuous, convex functionals on real Hilbert spaces. In the first part of the article we construct a Banach space that serves as the energy space for such functionals. In the second part we study…

We regard the Wheeler-De Witt equation as a Sturm-Liouville problem with the cosmological constant considered as the associated eigenvalue. The used method to study such a problem is a variational approach with Gaussian trial wave…

We study the Casimir problem as the limit of a conventional quantum field theory coupled to a smooth background. The Casimir energy diverges in the limit that the background forces the field to vanish on a surface. We show that this…

We study the symmetry and uniqueness of maps which minimise the $np$-Dirichlet energy, under the constraint that their Jacobian is a given radially symmetric function $f$. We find a condition on $f$ which ensures that the minimisers are…

This is a companion paper to arXiv:1207.3529 where we introduced the spinorial energy functional and studied its main properties in dimensions equal or greater than three. In this article we focus on the surface case. A salient feature here…

For a class of functions (called minimal Rad\'o functions) that arise naturally in minimal surface theory, we bound the number of interior critical points (counting multiplicity) in terms of the boundary data and the Euler characteristic of…

We compute the Casimir energy which arises in a bi-dimensional surface due to the quantum fluctuations of a scalar field. We assume that the boundaries are irregular and the field obeys Dirichlet condition. We re-parametrize the problem to…

The Casimir problem is usually posed as the response of a fluctuating quantum field to externally imposed boundary conditions. In reality, however, no interaction is strong enough to enforce a boundary condition on all frequencies of a…

Let $M$ and $N$ be doubly connected Riemann surfaces with $\mathscr{C}^{1,\alpha}$ boundaries and with nonvanishing conformal metrics $\sigma$ and $\wp$ respectively, and assume that $\wp$ is a smooth metric with bounded Gauss curvature…

A piston is introduced into a spherical lune Casimir cavity turning it into two adjacent lunes separated by the (hemispherical) piston. On the basis of zeta function regularisation, the vacuum energy of the arrangement is finite for…