Relaxation of bulk and interfacial energies (Q1817419)

The paper is concerned with the relaxation in the BV weak\(^*\) convergence of the functional \[ u\mapsto\int_\Omega f\bigl(x,\nabla u(x)\bigr) dx+\int_{\Sigma(u)} \varphi\bigl(x,[u](x),\nu(x)\bigr) d{\mathcal H}^{n-1}(x) \] defined in SBV\((\Omega,{\mathbb{R}}^p)\), where \(\Sigma(u)\) is the discontinuity set of \(u\), \([u]\) is the jump of \(u\) and \(\nu\) is the normal to \(\Sigma(u)\). Under linear growth assumptions on \(f\), the main result of the paper is the integral representation on BV\((\Omega,{\mathbb{R}}^p)\) of the relaxed functional: \[ \int_\Omega g\bigl(x,\nabla u(x)\bigr) dx+\int_{\Sigma(u)} h\bigl(x,[u](x),\nu(x)\bigr) d{\mathcal H}^{n-1}(x)+ \int_\Omega g^\infty\bigl(x,dC(u)\bigr)\leqno (1) \] where \(C(u)\) is the Cantor part of derivative of \(u\). The function \(g(x,\cdot)\) in (1) is the quasi-convex envelope of \(\tilde{g}(x,\cdot)\), where \[ \tilde{g}(x,A):=\inf\biggl\{f(x,A-a\otimes b)+\varphi_0(x,a,b): a\in{\mathbb{R}}^p, b\in{\mathbb{S}}^{n-1}\biggr\} \] and \[ \varphi_0(x,\xi,\nu):=\limsup_{t\downarrow 0}{\varphi(x,t\xi,\nu)\over t}. \] The jump energy density \(h\) can be computed solving an auxiliary unit cell variational problem involving the recession function \(f^\infty(x,\cdot)\) and \(\varphi\).