The Lewy--Stampacchia inequality for the obstacle problem with quadratic growth in the gradient (Q2505601)

A weak formulation of an obstacle problem for an elliptic operator \(-\text{div }A(x)Du+\lambda u-H(x,u,Du)\) with a (uniformly) coercive matrix \(A\) leads to the variational inequality \[ \begin{aligned} u\in K,\quad \int_\Omega A(x)Du(Dv-Du)\,dx+ & \lambda\int_\Omega u(v-u)\,dx \\ -\int_\Omega H(x,u,Du)(v-u)\,dx+&\int_\Omega f(v-u)\,dx\geq0\qquad \forall v\in K\end{aligned} \] where \(K=\{v\in H_0^1(\Omega)\cap L^\infty(\Omega):v\geq\psi\}\) and \(f\in L^\infty(\Omega)\). Assuming essentially that \(H\) has at most quadratic growth near \(\infty\) in the last variable, the authors show that this problem has at least one solution which is subject to the Lewy-Stampacchia inequality \[ 0\leq-\text{div}(A(x)Du)+\lambda u-H(x,u,Du)-f)\leq (-\text{div}(A(x)D\psi)+\lambda \psi-H(x,\psi,D\psi)-f)^+, \] provided \(\psi\) is such that the right-hand side is essentially bounded. Under some additional hypotheses, the solution is obtained as a limit of solutions of a penalized equation, and the additional hypotheses can be removed by considering certain small perturbations of \(f\).