Higher-order quasiconvexity reduces to quasiconvexity (Q1879202)

In the paper it is proved that smooth strictly 2-quasiconvex functions with \(p\)-growth at infinity, \(p>1\), whose gradients satisfy a local Lipschitz condition, can be extended to the space of all matrices as classical 1-quasiconvex functions with the same growth. Functions of this type appear in the variational treatment of problems involving second derivatives. When the Lipschitz condition is dropped, a weaker result is proved stating that each strictly 2-quasiconvex function with \(p\)-growth at infinity can be approximated by means of an increasing sequence of 1-quasiconvex functions with the same type of growth. By means of these results, lower semicontinuity problems for 2-quasiconvex normal integrands can be reduced to first-order problems, and some lower semicontinuity result are deduced on the space of special functions with bounded Hessian for integral energies depending on first and second order derivatives.