Full \(C^{1,\alpha}\)-regularity for free and constrained local minimizers of elliptic variational integrals with nearly linear growth (Q1576587)

The authors study the regularity of minimizers of the variational integral \(F(u) = \int_\Omega f(\nabla u)dx\), where \(\Omega\) is a bounded domain of \(R^n\), \(u\) is a function from \(\Omega \) into \({R^N}\), and the integrand \(f\) is smooth and satisfies nearly linear growth conditions. In particular it is supposed that \(f(\eta) \leq C(1+ |\eta|^2)^{{q}\over{2}}\) with \(q>1\) and \(D^2f(\eta)(\tau,\tau) \geq c(1 + |\eta|^2)^{-{\mu}\over{2}} |\tau|^2\). It is proved that if \(q< 2 - \mu + {{2}\over{n}}\) and if \(f(\eta) =g(|\eta|^2)\) when \(N>1\), then any local minimizer for \(F\) is of class \(C^{1,\alpha}\) in \(\Omega\), for any \(0<\alpha <1\). For \(N=1\) (the scalar case) a side condition \(u \geq \Phi\) can be incorparated and the regularity result is still true provided that \(\Phi \) is of class \(W^{2,\infty}_{\text{loc}}(\Omega)\).