A remark on polyconvex envelopes of radially symmetric functions in dimension \(2\times 2\) (Q1265620)

A coercive integral functional of type \( I(u)=\int _\Omega f(\nabla u)dx \) attains its minimum if the integrand \(f\) is convex. In vector case when \(\Omega \subset \mathbb R^n\) and \(\xi =\nabla u \in \mathbb R^{n\times N}\), the condition of convexity (C) of the integrand \(f(\xi)\) can be weakened to quasiconvexity (QC), that is difficult to verify. Thus notions of polyconvex (PC) and ``rank one convex'' (RC) functions were introduced. The following implication chain holds \[ \hbox { (C) }\implies \text{ (PC) }\implies \text{ (QC) } \implies \text{ (RC)}. \] The hypothesis on opposite implications were disproved by counterexamples, the case \(n=N=2\) remains open. The conditions (C), (PC), (QC), (RC) induce the corresponding envelopes of a given function \(f\). In the paper the author investigates polyconvex envelopes of radially symmetric functions of Kohn-Strang type \(f:\mathbb R^{2\times 2}\to \mathbb R\), \(f(A)=g(\| A \|)\), where \[ g(r)=\begin{cases} 1+{| r | }^p / p\quad &\text{for}\quad r>0\\ 0&\text{for}\quad r=0.\end{cases} \] The case \(p=2\) was solved in [\textit{R. Kohn} and \textit{G. Strang}, Commun. Pure Appl. Math. 39, 113-137 (1986; Zbl 0609.49008); ibid. 139-182 (1986; Zbl 0621.49008); ibid. 353-377 (1986; Zbl 0694.49004)]. In the reviewed paper the explicit form of the limit case \(p=\infty \), when \(g\) attains only three values \(0,1,\infty \), is computed. For the other \(p\) only the implicit form is introduced. The used method is taken from \textit{B. Dacorogna} [``Direct methods in the calculus of variations'' (1989; Zbl 0703.49001)].