arXiv subjects
Publications and source records attributed to Riccardo Cristoferi.
We determine the explicit value of the optimal constant in the trace inequality for functions of bounded variations in the case the domain has a particular class of singularities.
In this paper, we study the prototypical model of liquid-liquid phase separation, the Cahn-Hilliard functional, in a highly irregular setting. Specifically, we analyze potentials with low regularity vanishing on space-dependent wells. Under remarkably weak hypotheses, we establish a robust compactness result. Strengthening the regularity of the wells and of the growth of the potential close to the wells only slightly, we completely characterize the asymptotic behavior of the associated family of functionals through a $Γ$-convergence analysis. As a notable technical result, we prove the existence of geodesics for a degenerate metric and establish a uniform bound on their Euclidean length.
We study a Cahn-Hilliard model for phase separation in composite materials with multiple periodic microstructures. These are modeled by considering a highly oscillating potential. The focus of this paper is in the case where the scales of the microstructures are smaller than that of phase separation. We provide a compactness result and prove that the Γ-limit of the energy is a multiple of the perimeter. In particular, using the recently introduced unfolding operator for multiple scales, we show that the taking the limit of all of the scales together is equivalent to taking one limit at the time, starting from the smaller scale and keeping the larger fixed.
We study geometrically constrained magnetic walls in a three dimensional geometry where two bulks are connected by a thin neck. Without imposing any symmetry assumption on the domain, we investigate the scaling of the energy as the size of the neck vanishes. We identify five significant scaling regimes, for all of which we characterise the energy scaling and identify the asymptotic behaviour of the domain wall. Finally, we notice the emergence of sub-regimes that are not present in the previous works due to restrictive symmetry assumptions.
We revisit the classical problem of denoising a one-dimensional scalar-valued function by minimizing the sum of an $L^2$ fidelity term and the total variation, scaled by a regularization parameter. This study focuses on proving that the jump set of solutions, corresponding to discontinuities or edges, as well as the amplitude of the jumps are nonincreasing as the regularization parameter increases. Compared with previous works, our results apply to a strictly larger class of input functions, extending beyond the traditional setting of functions of bounded variation to any input in $L^\infty$ with left and right approximate limits everywhere. The proof leverages competitor constructions and convexity properties of the taut string problem, a well-known equivalent formulation of the TV model. This monotonicity property reflects that the extent to which geometric and topological features of the original signal are preserved is consistent with the amount of smoothing desired when formulating the denoising method.
We provide a first-order homogenization result for quadratic functionals. In particular, we identify the scaling of the energy and the explicit form of the limiting functional in terms of the first-order correctors. The main novelty of the paper is the use of the dual correspondence between quadratic functionals and PDEs, combined with a refinement of the classical Riemann-Lebesgue Lemma.
Recently it has been shown that the unique locally perimeter minimizing partitioning of the plane into three regions, where one region has finite area and the other two have infinite measure, is given by the so-called standard lens partition. Here we prove a sharp stability inequality for the standard lens; hence strengthening the local minimality of the lens partition in a quantitative form. As an application of this stability result we consider a nonlocal perturbation of an isoperimetric problem.
We consider a model to describe stable configurations in epitaxial growth of crystals in the two dimensional case, and in the regime of linearized elasticity. The novelty is that the model also takes into consideration the adatom density on the surface of the film. These are behind the main mechanisms of crystal growth and formation of islands (or quantum dots). The main result of the paper is the integral representation of the relaxed energy.
Regular polygons are characterized as area-constrained critical points of the perimeter functional with respect to particular families of perturbations in the class of polygons with a fixed number of sides. We also review recent results in the literature involving other shape functionals as well as further open problems.
In this paper we consider shape optimisation problems for sets of prescribed mass, where the driving energy functional is nonlocal and anisotropic. More precisely, we deal with the case of attractive/repulsive interactions in two and three dimensions, where the attraction is quadratic and the repulsion is given by an anisotropic variant of the Coulomb potential. Under the sole assumption of strict positivity of the Fourier transform of the interaction potential, we show the existence of a threshold value for the mass above which the minimiser is an ellipsoid, and below which the minimiser does not exist. If, instead, the Fourier transform of the interaction potential is only nonnegative, we show the emergence of a dichotomy: either there exists a threshold value for the mass as in the case above, or the minimiser is an ellipsoid for any positive value of the mass.
We consider a class of attractive-repulsive energies, given by the sum of two nonlocal interactions with power-law kernels, defined over sets with fixed measure. It has recently been proved by R. Frank and E. Lieb that the ball is the unique (up to translation) global minimizer for sufficiently large mass. We focus on the issue of the stability of the ball, in the sense of the positivity of the second variation of the energy with respect to smooth perturbations of the boundary of the ball. We characterize the range of masses for which the second variation is positive definite (large masses) or negative definite (small masses). Moreover, we prove that the stability of the ball implies its local minimality among sets sufficiently close in the Hausdorff distance, but not in $L^1$-sense.
A variational model for the interaction between homogenization and phase separation is considered in the regime where the former happens at a finer scale than the latter. The first order $Γ-$limit is proven to exhibit a separation of scales which has been previously conjectured in a paper by Bradies and Zeppieri and in the PhD thesis of Hagerty.
We consider a variational model for periodic partitions of the upper half-space into three regions, where two of them have prescribed volume and are subject to the geometrical constraint that their union is the subgraph of a function, whose graph is a free surface. The energy of a configuration is given by the weighted sum of the areas of the interfaces between the different regions, and a general volume-order term. We establish existence of minimizing configurations via relaxation of the energy involved, in any dimension. Moreover, we prove partial regularity results for volume-constrained minimizers in two space dimensions. Thin films of diblock copolymers are a possible application and motivation for considering this problem.
A variational model for the interaction between homogenization and phase separation is considered. The focus is on the regime where the latter happens at a smaller scale than the former, and when the wells of the double well potential are allowed to move and to have discontinuities. The zeroth and first order $Γ$-limits are identified. The topology considered for the latter is that of two-scale, since it encodes more information on the asymptotic local microstructure. In particular, when the wells are non constant, the first order $Γ$-limit describes the contribution of microscopic phase separation, also in situations where there is no macroscopic phase separation. As a corollary, the minimum of the mass constrained minimization problem is characterized, and it is shown to depend on whether or not the wells are discontinuous. In the process of proving these results, the theory of inhomogeneous Modica Mortola functionals is strengthened.
We consider Riesz-type nonlocal interaction energies over polygons. We prove the analog of the Riesz inequality in this discrete setting for triangles and quadrilaterals, and obtain that among all $N$-gons with fixed area, the nonlocal energy is maximized by a regular polygon, for $N=3,4$. Further we derive necessary first-order stationarity conditions for a polygon with respect to a restricted class of variations, which will then be used to characterize regular $N$-gons, for $N=3,4$, as solutions to an overdetermined free boundary problem.
We prove an asymptotic crystallization result in two dimensions for a class of nonlocal particle systems. To be precise, we consider the best approximation with respect to the 2-Wasserstein metric of a given absolutely continuous probability measure $f \mathrm{d}x$ by a discrete probability measure $\sum_i m_i δ_{z_i}$, subject to a constraint on the particle sizes $m_i$. The locations $z_i$ of the particles, their sizes $m_i$, and the number of particles are all unknowns of the problem. We study a one-parameter family of constraints. This is an example of an optimal location problem (or an optimal sampling or quantization problem) and it has applications in economics, signal compression, and numerical integration. We establish the asymptotic minimum value of the (rescaled) approximation error as the number of particles goes to infinity. In particular, we show that for the constrained best approximation of the Lebesgue measure by a discrete measure, the discrete measure whose support is a triangular lattice is asymptotically optimal. In addition, we prove an analogous result for a problem where the constraint is replaced by a penalization. These results can also be viewed as the asymptotic optimality of the hexagonal tiling for an optimal partitioning problem. They generalise the crystallization result of Bourne, Peletier and Theil (Communications in Mathematical Physics, 2014) from a single particle system to a class of particle systems, and prove a case of a conjecture by Bouchitté, Jimenez and Mahadevan (Journal de Mathématiques Pures et Appliquées, 2011). Finally, we prove a crystallization result which states that optimal configurations with energy close to that of a triangular lattice are geometrically close to a triangular lattice.
We consider the minimization of an energy functional given by the sum of a crystalline perimeter and a nonlocal interaction of Riesz type, under volume constraint. We show that, in the small mass regime, if the Wulff shape of the anisotropic perimeter has certain symmetry properties, then it is the unique global minimizer of the total energy. In dimension two this applies to convex polygons which are reflection symmetric with respect to the bisectors of the angles. We further prove a rigidity result for the structure of (local) minimizers in two dimensions.
We provide the integral representation formula for the relaxation in $BV(Ω; \mathbb{R}^M)$ with respect to strong convergence in $L^1(Ω; \mathbb{R}^M)$ of a functional with a boundary contact energy term. This characterization is valid for a large class of surface energy densities, and for domains satisfying mild regularity assumptions. Motivated by some classical examples where lower semicontinuity fails, we analyze the extent to which the geometry of the set enters the relaxation procedure.