On the higher differentiability of solutions to a class of variational problems of fast growth (Q1751606)

The authors consider the integral functional \[ v\mapsto\int_{\Omega}\Lambda\big(x,|\nabla v(x)|\big)+f(x)v(x)\;dx. \] A key assumption is that the function \(\Lambda\) is of ``fast growth'', by which it is meant that the map \(t\mapsto\Lambda(\cdot,t)\) grows faster than \(t^N\), where \(N\) is the space dimension. A model functional that the authors mention is \[ \int_{\Omega}a(x)\left(e^{\left|\nabla v(x)\right|^2}-1\right)+f(x)v(x)\;dx. \] In particular, the main result concerns proving existence to the problem \[ \int_{\Omega}\left<\frac{\partial}{\partial t}\Lambda\big(x,|\nabla u(x)|\big)\frac{\nabla u(x)}{\big|\nabla u(x)\big|},\nabla\phi(x)\right>+f(x)\phi(x)\;dx=0 \] for each \(\phi\in\mathcal{C}_c^{\infty}(\Omega)\).