Energy scaling law for a single disclination in a thin elastic sheet (Q524313)

The setup of the present article is the following: We consider a plane elastic disc and remove a sector. Then we glue the cut back and obtain an elastic sheet with the shape of a cone with a singularity at zero. The author now considers three different elastic energies for this setting: the free elastic energy of the fully nonlinear plate, the three-dimensional energy of nonlinear elasticity and the energy in the Föppl-von Karman plate theory. In all these cases the authors derives lower and upper bounds for the energies. He thereby generalises a result by himself [\textit{H. Olbermann}, J. Nonlinear Sci. 26, No. 2, 287--314 (2016; Zbl 1344.49076)], where upper and lower bounds for a modified free elastic energy were obtained under the stronger assumption that the exponential map at zero supplies a global chart, which allowed the author to control the Gauss-curvature. One of the key observations in the present work that allows to overcome this assumption of the previous work, is that the Gauss-curvature can also be controlled by \(\sum_{i=1}^3 \det D^2 y_i\) for a deformation \(y\) by using Sobolev inequalities and the Brouwer degree.