Relaxation and nonoccurrence of the Lavrentiev phenomenon for nonconvex problems (Q2376651)

Let \(\Omega \subset \mathbb{R}^{n}\) be open and bounded, \(\overline{\Omega }\,\;\)and\(~\partial \Omega \,,\)\ be its closure and boundary, respectively. Consider the following multidimensional variational problem \[ \begin{cases} J_{f}(x(\cdot)) =\int_{\Omega }f(t,x(t) ,x^{\prime }(t)) ~dt\rightsquigarrow \inf \\ x(\cdot) |_{\Gamma }=\varphi , \end{cases}\tag{P} \] where \(f:\overline{\Omega }\times \mathbb{R\times R}^{n}\rightarrow \mathbb{R}\) is continuous and \(\varphi :\Gamma \rightarrow \mathbb{R}\) is an arbitrary fixed function, with \(\Gamma \subset \partial \Omega \). It is proved that, provided \(f\) satisfies a certain superlinear growth condition in the third variable, namely \[ \lim_{\| \zeta\| \rightarrow \infty }\frac{f(t,x,\zeta) }{\| \zeta\| }=\infty \] locally uniformly in \((t,x) ,\) then the problem \[ \begin{cases} J_{f}^{\star \star }(x(\cdot)) =\int_{\Omega}f^{\star \star }(t,x(t) ,x^{\prime }(t)) dt\rightsquigarrow \inf \\ x(\cdot) |_{\Gamma }=\varphi \end{cases} \] is a lower semicontinuous relaxation of the problem (P). Here \(f^{\star \star }\) is a convexification of the integrand with respect to the third variable \(\zeta \in \mathbb{R}^{n}\). The set of admissible functions, \(E\left( \varphi \right) :=\left\{ x\left( \cdot \right) \in W_{\infty }^{1}\left( \Omega \right) :x\left( \cdot \right) |_{\Gamma}=\varphi\right\} ,\) is endowed with the Lipschitz convergence introduced by Morrey. The existence of a relaxation that has a Lipschitz solution implies the existence of a Lipschitz converging minimizing sequence for the original problem. Moreover, it is shown that the existence of a regular minimizing sequence for one-dimensional variational problems rules out the Lavrentiev phenomenon for some classes of nonconvex integrands. The proofs of the main results are based on some preliminary findings on spannability of functions.