Regularity of free boundaries in obstacle problems (Q2662444)

In this paper, elliptic PDEs with free boundaries are studied, where interphase (the free boundary) is unknown a priori. There is a wide variety of problems in physics, industry, biology, finance, which can be described by PDEs that exhibit free boundaries. Many of such problems can be written as variational inequalities, for which the solution is obtained by minimizing a constrained energy functional. The most important example is the classical obstacle problem. Obstacle problems occur in the dam problem describing the filtration of water inside a porous dam, in the Stefan problem that describes the temperature of a homogeneous medium undergoing a phase change, in Hele-Shaw flows that describes a fluid flow between two flat parallel plates separated by a very thin gap. The obstacle problem appears also in optimal stopping problems for stochastic processes and in large systems of interacting particles arising in physical, biological, or material sciences. In these notes, some of the main known results are summarized, and an overview of more recent research on this topic is given. The basic properties of solutions to the obstacle problem such as existence, optimal regularity, nondegeneracy, and quadratic growth are studied. Special emphasis is placed on the classical work of Caffarelli, in which he established the regularity of free boundaries in the obstacle problem, outside a certain set of singular points. For the entire collection see [Zbl 1461.49002].