Homogenization of surface and length energies for spin systems (Q1948130)

The authors describe a homogenization result for energies related to Ising systems of the type \[ E_{\varepsilon }(u)=-\sum_{i,j}c_{ij}^{\varepsilon }u_{i}u_{j}, \] where \(u_{i}\) is a spin variable indexed on a portion of a cubic lattice \(\Omega \cap \mathbb{Z}^{d}\). The authors will consider different hypotheses on the coefficients \(c_{ij}^{\varepsilon }\). In each case, they define the notion of homogenizable system of coefficients \( c_{ij}^{\varepsilon }\), leading to the introduction of some limit energy density \(\varphi \). In the first part of their paper, they assume that \( c_{ij}^{\varepsilon }=\varepsilon c_{ij}\) with \(0<\alpha \leq c_{ij}\leq \beta <+\infty \). They prove that the limit energy functional is defined on the subsets \(A\) of finite perimeter in \(\Omega \) through \[ F(A)=\int_{\Omega \cap \delta ^{\ast }A}\varphi (\nu )d\mathcal{H}^{d-1}, \] where \(d\mathcal{H} ^{d-1}\) is the \((d-1)\)-dimensional Hausdorff measure. The \(\Gamma \) -convergence in taken in the \(BV\)-sense. In the second case, the authors allow the coefficients \(c_{ij}^{\varepsilon }\) to change sign. They here change the energy functional taking \[ E_{\varepsilon }(u)=-\frac{1}{8} \sum_{i,j}\varepsilon ^{d-1}c_{ij}(u_{i}-u_{j})^{2}, \] with \(\left| c_{ij}\right| \leq \beta \). In the last part of their paper, the authors consider discrete paths \(\gamma \) and the energy \[ F_{\varepsilon }(\gamma )=\sum_{n=1,\cdots ,N}\varepsilon c_{i_{n}i_{n-1}}, \] assuming that the points \(\varepsilon i_{j}=\gamma (\varepsilon n)\) satisfy \(\left| i_{n}-i_{n-1}\right| =1\) in the \(L^{1}\)-norm on \(\mathbb{Z}^{d}\), the coefficients \(c_{ij}\) satisfying \(0<\alpha \leq c_{ij}\leq \beta <+\infty \). For these three cases, the authors extend their main results considering possible extensions. For the proofs of the convergence results, the authors build appropriate sequences and they use various tools such as Besicovich derivation theorem and compactness or equiboundedness results.