Elliptic problems on networks with constrictions (Q2502328)

The authors study the asymptotic behaviour of minimizers to sequences of elliptic variational problems posed on thin three-dimensional domains. The region to be considered is denoted \(\Omega_{\varepsilon}\); \(\Omega_{\varepsilon}\) is defined from a graph in \(\mathbb{R}^3\) consisting of a union of line segments from the origin. The problem is to minimize the Dirichlet integral \[ \inf_{{\mathcal A}_\varepsilon} \int_{\Omega_{\varepsilon}} | \nabla{u}| ^{2}\, dx \] over an admissible set \(\mathcal{A}_{\varepsilon}\) consisting of functions with square-integrable gradients. The asymptotic behaviour of minimizers is described (Theorem 2.5, p. 469). The results are generalized in varios directions as to the Ginzburg-Landau energy for example. The Frenet equations from mechanics are used in the description of the branches of \(\Omega_{\varepsilon}\).