Minimizers for the thin one-phase free boundary problem

Max Engelstein, Aapo Kauranen, Marti Prats Soler, Yorgos Sakellaris, Sire Yannick*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticleScientificpeer-review

Abstract

We consider the "thin one-phase" free boundary problem, associated to minimizing a weighted Dirichlet energy of the function in $$\mathbb{R}^{n+1}_+$$ plus the area of the positivity set of that function in $$\mathbb{R}^{n}$$. We establish full regularity of the free boundary for dimensions $$n \leq 2$$, prove almost everywhere regularity of the free boundary in arbitrary dimension and provide content and structure estimates on the singular set of the free boundary when it exists. All of these results hold for the full range of the relevant weight.

While our results are typical for the calculus of variations, our approach does not follow the standard one first introduced by Alt and Caffarelli. Instead, the nonlocal nature of the distributional measure associated to a minimizer necessitates arguments which are less reliant on the underlying PDE.
Original language English COMMUNICATIONS ON PURE AND APPLIED MATHEMATICS Accepted/In press - 2020 A1 Journal article-refereed

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