Regularity of the free boundary in two-phase problems for linear elliptic operators

DOI10.1016/J.AIM.2007.02.004MaRDI QIDQ2642052zbMATH OpenOpenAlexFDO

Publication date 20 August 2007

Published in Advances in Mathematics (Search for Journal in Brave)

Full work available at URL https://doi.org/10.1016/j.aim.2007.02.004

Elliptic operator Free boundary Two-phase problems

Smoothness and regularity of solutions to PDEs (35B65) Second-order elliptic equations (35J15) Free boundary problems for PDEs (35R35) General theory of partial differential operators (47F05)

Review text

This paper is a continuation of a previous paper by \textit{M. C. Cerutti, F. Ferrari} and \textit{S. Salsa} [ Arch. Ration. Mech. Anal., 171, 329--348 (2004; Zbl 1106.35144)], and it is concerned with the \(C^{1,\gamma}\) regularity of free boundaries that are originally assumed to be Lipschitz or ``flat (meaning that the boundary is very close to a Lipschitz function of small Lipschitz constant). The setting is the following: In the cylinder \(B_1(0) \times (-1,1) \subset {\mathbb R}^{n-1} \times {\mathbb R}\) there is a function \(u \in W^{2,p}\), \(p > n\), satisfying the linear elliptic equations \[ \mathrm{Tr}(A_s D^2 u) + b_s \cdot Du = 0, \qquad s= 1, 2, \] in \(\Omega^+ = \{u > 0\}\) for \(s = 1\), and \(\Omega^- = \{u \leq 0\}\) for \(s = 2\). Here, the matrices \(A_s\) are symmetric, uniformly elliptic, and Hölder continuous, while \(b_s\) are bounded measurable vectors, for \(s = 1,2\). It is moreover assumed that \(u\) satisfies a free boundary condition in a weak (so-called viscosity) sense. The improvements with respect to the previous paper are less restrictive assumptions on the vectors \(b_i\), as well as including the case of flat boundaries. It is furthermore shown that if the two elliptic operators are identical, the same result holds for operators of divergence form also when \(A_1(x,u) = A_2(x,u)\) depends on the solution \(u\). This is a comprehensive and highly technical article. The techniques used are partly based on a classical paper by \textit{L. Caffarelli} [Commun. Pure Appl. Math., 42, 55--78 (1989; Zbl 0676.35086)], but are also developments of \textit{I. Athanasopoulos, L. Caffarelli}, and \textit{S. Salsa} [Commun. Pure Appl. Math., 51, 77--112 (1998; Zbl 0924.35197)].

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