Hodge decomposition with degenerate weights and the Gross-Pitaevskii energy (Q2426496)

The author is interested in the study of the so-called ``Hodge decomposition problem'' with respect to a weight function that vanishes on the boundary. More precisely, let \(a\in C^\infty({\mathbb R}^n)\) be a real-valued function that has \(\lim_{| x| \to\infty}a(x)=+\infty\). Choose a regular value of \(a\), \(\lambda\in{\mathbb R}\), define \(\rho=(\lambda-a)^+\) and \(\Omega=\{x\in {\mathbb R}^n;\rho(x)>0\}\not=\emptyset\), and let \(m\geq 1\) be a positive integer. Given \(V\in C^{2,\alpha}(\Omega,{\mathbb R}^n)\), find \(s_V\in C^{2,\alpha}(\Omega)\), \(B_V\in C^{2,\alpha}(\Omega;{\mathbb R}^n)\) and a harmonic vector field \(h_V:\Omega\to{\mathbb R}^n\), such that \(\rho^m(\nabla s_V+h_V-V)=\nabla \times B_V\) in \(\Omega\), and some more regularity conditions on the boundary should be satisfied. The author proves that one can solve the above decomposition for any \(V\in C^{2,\alpha}(\Omega,{\mathbb R}^n)\). Furthermore, one can choose \(s_V\), \(h_V\) and \(B_V\) so that on \(\partial\Omega\) one has \(h_V\cdot \nu=0\) and \((V-\nabla s_V)\cdot\nu=0\). An application to some energy functional \(E_\varepsilon\) is given, where the relation with the De Giorgi's \(\Gamma\)-convergence technique in functional analysis is the main result. After a detailed introduction the paper splits in four more sections and two appendices. 1. Preliminaries. 2. Hodge decomposition with respect to a degenerate weight. 3. Reduction of \(E_\varepsilon\) to \(\Omega\). 4. \(\Gamma\)-limit for \(E_\varepsilon\). Appendix A. Weighted Sobolev spaces. Appendix B. Real-valued minimizers of \(E_\varepsilon\).