Sobolev spaces of isometric immersions of arbitrary dimension and co-dimension (Q522161)

Classical differential geometry requires at least \(C^{2}\)-regularity of surfaces. It is natural to substitute the classical \(C^{2}\)-regularity with the generalized Sobolev's \(W^{2 ,p}\)-regularity and to find the smallest \(p\). The authors utilize such approach and present the following first main result in which they prove \(C_{\mathrm{loc}}^{1}\)-regularity and developability of a \(W_{\mathrm{loc}}^{2 ,p}\)-immersion of a bounded open subset in \(\mathbb{R}^{n}\) into \(\mathbb{R}^{n +k}\) with \(p\) satisfying \(p \geq \min \left \{2k ,n\right \}\). The second main result of the paper deals with a similar statement for scalar functions and is related to the pointwise degenerate Monge-Ampère equations: let \(\Omega \) be a bounded open subset in \(\mathbb{R}^{n}\), \(u \in W^{2 ,p}\) with \(p \geq \min \left \{2k ,n\right \}\) and \(\text{rank}\left (D^{2}u\right ) \leq k\) a.e. in \(\Omega \) for some \(k \in \left \{1 ,2 , \dots ,n -1\right \} .\) Then \(u \in C^{1}\left (\Omega \right )\) and \(u\) is \(\left (n -k\right )\)-developable. The authors explain that the condition \(p \geq \min \left \{2k ,n\right \}\) cannot be weakened if \(k =1\) or \(n -1\). However, they conjecture a weaker condition when \(k \in \left \{2 ,3 , \dots ,n -2\right \} .\)