Calculus of Variations and Geometric Measure Theory

Singularities, Rectifiability, and PDE-constraints

Filip Rindler (University of Warwick)

created by scharrer on 21 Dec 2022
modified on 13 Jan 2023

18 jan 2023 -- 14:00   [open in google calendar]

Agenda: Get-together (30 min), presentation Filip Rindler (60 min), questions and discussions (30 min).

Registration required for new participants. Please go to our seminar website (allow one work day for processing).

Abstract.

Surprisingly many different problems of Analysis naturally lead to questions about singularities in (vector) measures. These problems come from both "pure" Analysis, such as the question for which measures Rademacher's theorem on the differentiability of Lipschitz functions holds, and its non-Euclidean analogues, as well as from "applied" Analysis, for example the problem to determine the fine structure of slip lines in elasto-plasticity. It is a remarkable fact that many of the (vector) measures that naturally occur in these questions satisfy an (under-determined) PDE constraint, e.g., divergence- or curl-freeness. The crucial task is then to analyse the fine properties of these PDE-constrained measures, in particular to determine the possible singularities that may occur. It turns out that the PDE constraint imposes strong restrictions on the shape of these singularities, for instance that they can only occur on a set of bounded Hausdorff-dimension, or even that the measure is $k$-rectifiable where its upper $k$-density is positive. The essential difficulty in the analysis of PDE-constrained measures is that many standard methods from harmonic analysis are much weaker in an $L^1$-context and thus new strategies are needed. In this talk, I will survey recent and ongoing work on this area of research.