On the porosity of free boundaries in degenerate variational inequalities (Q1577656)

Let us define \[ K_{\theta}=\{ v\in W^{1,p}(\Omega): \;v-\theta \in W^{1,p}_{0}(\Omega), \;v\geq 0 \text{ a.e. in }\Omega \} \] for a given bounded domain \( \Omega \) and \(\theta \in W^{1,p}(\Omega)\cap L^{\infty}(\Omega)\). A function \(v\in K_{\theta}\) is a solution to the obstacle problem if \[ \int\limits_{\Omega}(|\nabla u|^{p-2}\nabla u (\nabla v-\nabla u)+f(v-u))dx\geq 0 \] \noindent whenever \(v\in K_{\theta}\). The authors obtained exact estimates for the solution to the obstacle problem near the free boundary and prove that the free boundary is porous and therefore its Hausdorff dimension is less than \(N\) and hence it is of Lebesgue measure zero.