Periodic phase separation: the periodic Cahn-Hilliard and isoperimetric problems (Q851463)

The authors discuss some properties of the periodic Cahn-Hilliard problem in the 2D and 3D cases. In the first part of the paper, they introduce the classical Cahn-Hilliard energy defined on \(L^{1}(\mathbb{T}^{n})\), where \( \mathbb{T}^{n}\) is the flat torus of \(\mathbb{R}^{n}\), and which is finite for functions in \(H^{1}(\mathbb{T}^{n})\) and satisfying \(\int_{\mathbb{T} ^{n}}u=m\), for some fixed \(m\in (-1,1)\). The authors prove the \(\Gamma \) -convergence result for this energy, in the topology of \(L^{1}(\mathbb{T} ^{n})\), to some limit energy which involves the perimeter functional for functions of \(BV(\mathbb{T}^{n})\). The authors prove that this limit minimization problem is equivalent to a periodic isoperimetric minimization problem for subsets of \(\mathbb{T}^{n}\) with given perimeter. The main part of the paper presents some properties of the global or of the local minimizers of the limit periodic isoperimetric problem. The authors describe the possible shapes of the global minimizers and prove some convergence results for sequence of local minimizers. In the last part of the paper, the authors consider the asymptotic behaviour of some nonlocal perturbation of the above Cahn-Hilliard problem. The paper ends with some open questions linked to this context.