Boundary value problems in spaces of distributions on smooth and polygonal domains (Q930712)

Boundary value problems of the form \(-\Delta u= f\) in \(\Omega\) and \(Bu= g\) on the boundary \(\partial\Omega\), with either Dirichlet or Neumann boundary conditions, are studied, where \(\Omega\) is a smooth bounded domain in \(\mathbb{R}^n\) and the data \(f\) and \(g\) are distributions. This problem has to be first properly reformulated and it is crucial to obtain the continuity of the solution \(u\) in terms of \(f\) and \(g\). For \(f= 0\), taking advantage of the fact that \(u\) is harmonic in \(\Omega\), four formulations are provided of this problem: one using nontangential limits of harmonic functions, one using Green's functions, one using the Dirichlet-to-Neumann map, and a variational one. Then these four formulations are shown to be equivalent. A similar analysis is made for \(f\neq 0\) and the roles of \(f\) and \(g\) are discussed. They turn to be interchangeable to a certain extent in the low regularity case. The weak formulation is more convenient for numerical approximation by the finite element method etc., whereas the nontangential limits definition is closer to the intuition and easier to check in concrete situations. The weak formulation is also extended to polygonal domain cases using the weighted Sobolev spaces. Furthermore, some new phenomena for the ``concentrated loads'' at the vertices in the polygonal cases are pointed out. At present, the results are essentially theoretical ones, and applications to concrete problems including numerical computations are highly expected.