Regularity results for nonlinear elliptic systems and applications (Q1604829)

The book under review presents several topics of the regularity theory for nonlinear elliptic equations and systems which have been developed in recent years. In general, the results of the various branches of this theory are scattered in the journal literature and presented in the context of a special problem. To facilitate further applications, the authors first developed the basics of the regularity theory for nonlinear elliptic problems independently of specific models and then apply this theory to a number of important systems of nonlinear PDE's. The material presented in this book, is not covered by the well-known monographs by C. B. Morrey, O. A. Ladyzhenskaya and N. N. Ural'tseva, D. Gilbarg and N. Trudinger, and M. Giaquinta. The content of the chapters of the book is a follows. 1. General technical results. This chapter presents the function spaces used throughout the book, a detailed dicussion of Poincaré inequalities, higher integrability by reverse Hölder's inequality, the hole-filling technique of Widman and the study of the Green function of a second order elliptic operator. 2. General regularity results. The topics of this chapter are: \(W^{1,p}\)-regularity by higher integrability of the gradient, obtaining \(C^\delta\)-regularity, proof of \(L^\infty \)-bounds and more results on regularity. 3. Nonlinear elliptic system arising from stochastic games. 4. Nonlinear elliptic systems arising from ergodic control. The results presented in these two chapters are obtained by the authors during the recent years. The investigations are concerned with nonlinear systems in diagonal form involving a linear second or elliptic operator and terms depending quadratically on the gradient of the solution. These nonlinear terms are subject to certain structure conditions and partial smallness conditions. The authors prove existence and regularity of solutions to these systems of PDE's. Chap. 3 is concerned with Bellman systems of equations arising from the theory of stochastic games. The maximum principle is the main tool to obtain \(L^\infty\) estimates and then to derive \(H^1\), \(W^{1,p}\) and \(C^\delta\) estimates. In Chap. 4 the authors study similar systems where, however, it is impossible to obtain \(L^\infty\) bounds. 5. Harmonic mappings. This chapter is concerned with harmonic mappings from a bounded open set \(\Omega \subset \mathbb R^n\) into the unit sphere. The authors prove a result by Hélein on the regularity of harmonic mappings when \(n=2\). To achieve this, they make use of Hardy space methods. 6. Nonlinear elliptic systems arising from the theory of semiconductors. The authors consider the stationary van Roosbroeck stystem in semi-conductor theory in the following situations of recombination-generation of carriers: case without impact ionization, case with impact ionization, impact ionization without recombination. The existence of a weak solution to these systems of nonlinear PDE's is proved. 7. Stationary Navier-Stokes equations. The discussion in this chapter concerns the regularity of solutions to the Navier Stokes equations in dimensions \(n\geq4\). The investigations are heavily based on the use of the ''head pressure'' \(p + \displaystyle\frac{| u| ^2}{2}\) and weighted norm estimates. 8. Strongly coupled elliptic systems. This chapter is concerned with the regularity of weak solutions to the system \[ -D_ia_i^\nu (x,Du) = f^\nu \quad (\nu = 1, \ldots , N) . \] The topics are: \(H^2_{loc}\) and Meyer's regularity results, Hölder regularity, \(C^{1+\alpha}\)-regularity, almost everywhere regularity, regularity in the Uhlenbeck case, counter examples, regularity for mixed boundary value problems. 9. Dual approach to nonlinear elliptic systems. 10. Nonlinear elliptic systems arising from plasticity theory. In these two chapters the authors study nonlinear systems of PDE's which are formulations of elasticity and plasticity problems in terms of stresses. The authors prove existence and regularity results \( (H^1_{loc},\,W^{1,p}_{loc},\, C^{1+\delta}_{loc}, C^\delta )\) for various variants of the systems under consideration. The knowledge of Lebesgue measure and integration is a prerequisite for reading this book. It may serve for teaching to higher graduate students and for researchers in the field of nonlinear PDE's.