Modeling of dislocations and relaxation of functionals on 1-currents with discrete multiplicity (Q745572)

Right at the beginning of the article the authors prove a nice extension of the classical density theorem in the context of 1-current forms for vector-valued currents. From this result they deduce corresponding compactness and structure theorems in the vectorial-valued case. Then, they develop a theory of relaxation for specific functionals, namely, energies concentrated on lines. After several technical lemmas, whose proofs are quite involved, they obtain a deep lower semicontinuity theorem, which is the main result of the paper. The authors then turn their attention to dislocations in cubic crystals, where they use their previous results to develop a thorough analysis of this concrete case, which concludes this interesting and important paper.