Stability of some unilateral free-discontinuity problems in two-dimensional domains (Q4458301)

The paper deals with unilateral minima of the following problem. Given an open bounded connected set \(\Omega\subset R^2\) with Lipschitz boundary, \(\partial_D\Omega\subset \partial \Omega\) a relatively open subset with a finite number of connected components, \(g\in W^{1,p}(\Omega)\) and \(f:\Omega\times R^2\to R\) a Borel function such that \(\xi\mapsto f(x,\xi)\) is strictly convex and \({\mathcal C}^1\) with \[ \alpha | \xi| ^p\leq f(x,\xi)\leq \beta | \xi| ^p+\gamma, \quad \alpha, \beta, \gamma >0, \] it is possible to define the following functional: \[ E(u,K)=\int _{\Omega\setminus K}f(x,\nabla u)dx +{\mathcal H}^1(K), \] where \(K\) is a compact subset of \(\overline \Omega\) and \(u\) is in the Deny-Lions space \(L^{1,p}(\Omega\setminus K)\) with \(u=g\) on \(\partial _D\Omega\setminus K\)? The unilateral minimality condition for the couple \((u,K)\) is given by \[ E(u,K)\leq E(w,H) \] among all compact subsets \(H\) of \(\overline \Omega\) with \(H\supset K\) and \(w\in L^{1,p}(\Omega\setminus H)\) with \(w=g\) on \(\partial _D\Omega\setminus H\). The goal of the paper is to study the stability properties of the problem under perturbation of the set \(K\) with respect to the Hausdorff convergence and under perturbation of the boundary datum \(g\) with respect to the strong \(W^{1,p}(\Omega)\) topology. The main result is obtained if the sequence \(K_h\) is assumed to have the number of connected components and the length uniformly bounded. The authors also study the behaviour of the functional when the sequence \(K_h\) is changed with a new sequence \(H_h\) joining the connected component of \(K_h\) in such a way that the connected component of \(H_h\) converges, independently, to the connected component of the limit set \(K\).