Concentrations and Fine Properties of PDE-constrained measures

The interaction between microscopic and macroscopic quantities lies at the heart of fascinating problems in the modern theory of nonlinear PDEs.

This phenomenon, modeled by weak forms of convergence, entails the formation of oscillations, concentrations, and fine geometric patterns ubiquitous in geometric, physical, and materials science models.

ConFine will investigate the nature of concentrations and fine geometries arising from longstanding conjectures and novel questions of the calculus of variations. The goals comprise two themes. Theme I examines the qualitative and quantitative nature of PDE-constrained concentrations.

Building upon results recently pioneered by the PI, its purpose is to prove a novel interpretation of Bouchitte's Vanishing mass conjecture, and novel compensated integrability results, with profound implications for the compensated compactness theory. Theme II investigates the fine properties of PDE-constrained measures from three different perspectives.

Via potential and measure theory methods, it will attempt to produce substantial advances towards solving the sigma-finiteness conjecture in BD spaces. It will also investigate the structure integral of varifolds with bounded first-variation. The goal is to prove that these measure-theoretic generalizations of surfaces possess an underlying BV-like structure.

Lastly, Theme II conjectures a complementary result to the ground-breaking De Philippis--Rindler theorem, which asserts that the regular part of an A-free measure is essentially unconstrained.

This set of problems comprises significant theoretical obstacles at the forefront of the calculus of variations and geometric measure theory. In this regard, the proposed methodology gathers novel ideas oriented to overcome such paramount challenges.

Consequently, far-reaching implications beyond the proposed objectives are expected, in the development of new methods and applications, in diverse fields of Analysis.