Regularity and geometric estimates for minima of discontinuous functionals (Q2340461)

In this paper, the authors study the existence, the regularity and qualitative properties of minimisers of the functional \[ E(u)=\int_\Omega F(\cdot,u,Du) \] in the Sobolev space \(W^{1,p}_\phi(\Omega)\). The assumptions on \(F\) roughly require that it behaves like \[ F(x,u,\xi)=|\xi|^{p-2}A(x):\xi \otimes \xi \;+\;f(x) \big(\max\{u,0\}\big)^m\;+\;Q(x)\chi_{\{u>0\}}(x), \] where \(A\) is continuous and elliptic, \(f\) is \(L^\infty\), \(Q\) is Hölder continuous and \(m>p\). The paper contains many interesting results, including regularity estimates for both \(u\) and the (reduced) boundary of \(\{u>0\}\), utilising a combination of measure theoretic and PDE tools. It extends previous results due to \textit{H. W. Alt} and \textit{L. A. Caffarelli} [J. Reine Angew. Math. 325, 105--144 (1981; Zbl 0449.35105)] and \textit{D. Danielli} and \textit{A. Petrosyan} [Calc. Var. Partial Differ. Equ. 23, No. 1, 97--124 (2005; Zbl 1068.35187)] on simpler cases. The paper is very well written and relatively self-contained. A minor comment of the reviewer is that at certain points the notation is confusing (e.g., the use of \(X\) instead of \(x\) for the space variable, omitting \(x\) for some of the functions in the same formulas, etc.).