Extrapolated elliptic regularity and application to the van Roosbroeck system of semiconductor equations (Q2656285)

The authors consider the second-order differential operator in divergence form \(-\nabla\cdot \rho \nabla\), where \(\rho\) is a bounded measurable uniformly-a.e. positive definite coefficient matrix defined on a bounded domain \(\Omega\subset\mathbb{R}^d\) with nonsmooth boundary. By using an extrapolation technique, under some assumptions, they prove that there exists a positive number \(\bar s\) such that the regularity property \[-\nabla \cdot \rho \nabla u\in W_D^{s-1,q}(\Omega)\,\,\,\Rightarrow \,\,\,u\in W_D^{1+s,q}(\Omega)\leqno(1)\] holds for some \(q\in (1,\infty)\) and \(s\in (-\bar s,\bar s)\), where \(D\) is a subset of \(\Omega\). Here the subscript \(D\) means that the boundary trace on \(D\) is zero. The property (1) is also established for second-order operators with lower order terms and for boundary forms which arise from Robin boundary conditions. The local-in-time existence and uniqueness for the van Roosbroeck system for semiconductor devices using the extrapolated elliptic regularity result are finally obtained.