Recent studies on Sobolev mappings (Q515694)

This is a survey paper devoted to homeomorphisms from an open set \(\Omega\subset{\mathbb R}^2\) into \({\mathbb R}^2\) whose components \(v_1,v_2\) belong to \(W_{\text{loc}}^{1,1}(\Omega)\) and are characterized by means of systems of elliptic PDE's. The paper also contains a proof of the following new result. Let \({\mathbb D}\) be the open unit disk. A homeomorphism \(U=(u_1,u_s)\in W_{\text{loc}}^{1,1}({\mathbb D}):{\mathbb D}\to{\mathbb D}\) is said to be a quasiharmonic map if \(u_1,u_2\) satisfy the equations \({\text{div}}\,B(y)\nabla u_1=0\) and \({\text{div}}\,B(y)\nabla u_2=0\), where \(B\) is a symmetric \(2\times 2\) matrix function with degenerate ellipticity bounds \(\frac{|\xi|^2}{H(y)}\leq\langle B(y)\xi,\xi\rangle\leq H(y)|\xi|^2\) for all \(\xi\in{\mathbb R}^2\) and almost all \(y\in{\mathbb D}\), with \(H:{\mathbb D}\to[1,+\infty)\) a measurable distortion. It is proved that a sufficient condition for a map \(U:{\mathbb D}\to{\mathbb D}\) belonging to \(W_{\text{loc}}^{1,1}({\mathbb D})\) to be a quasiharmonic map is that \(U\) is a bi-Sobolev map, that is, \(U^{-1}\in W_{\text{loc}}^{1,1}({\mathbb D})\). A quasiharmonic map \(U\) is constructed such that \(U^{-1}\in BV({\mathbb D})\setminus W_{\text{loc}}^{1,1}({\mathbb D})\). Thus, the above sufficient condition is not necessary.