Critical points of a variant of the Ambrosio-Tortorelli functional, for which non-zero Dirichlet boundary conditions replace the fidelity term, are investigated. They are shown to converge to particular critical points of the corresponding variant of the Mumford-Shah functional; those exhibit many symmetries. That Dirichlet variant is the natural functional when addressing a problem of brittle fracture in an elastic material.

Critical points of a variant of the Ambrosio-Tortorelli functional, for which non-zero Dirichlet boundary conditions replace the fidelity term, are investigated. They are shown to converge to particular critical points of the corresponding variant of the Mumford-Shah functional; those exhibit many symmetries. That Dirichlet variant is the natural functional when addressing a problem of brittle fracture in an elastic material.

On the unit disk $B_1\subset {ℝ}^2$ we study the Moser-Trudinger functional $E\left(u\right)={\int }_{B_1}\left(e^{u^2}-1\right)dx,u\in H_0^1\left(B_1\right)$ and its restrictions ${E|}_{M_{\Lambda }}$, where $M_{\Lambda }:=\{u\in H_0^1\left(B_1\right){:\parallel u\parallel }_{H_0^1}^2=\Lambda \}$ for $\Lambda >0$. We prove that if a sequence $u_k$ of positive critical points of ${E|}_{M_{{\Lambda }_k}}$ (for some ${\Lambda }_k>0$) blows up as $k\to \infty$, then ${\Lambda }_k\to 4\pi$, and $u_k\to 0$ weakly in $H_0^1\left(B_1\right)$ and strongly in $C_{\mathrm{loc}}^1({\overline{B}}_1\setminus \left\{0\right\})$. Using this fact we also prove that when $\Lambda$ is large enough, then ${E|}_{M_{\Lambda }}$ has no positive critical point, complementing previous existence results by Carleson-Chang, M. Struwe and Lamm-Robert-Struwe.

It is noted that the examples provided in the paper "Two-dimensional examples of rank-one convex functions that are not quasiconvex" by M. K. Benaouda and J. J. Telega, Ann. Polon. Math. 73 (2000), 291-295, contain unrecoverable errors.

We study two classes of linear representations of a surface group: Hitchin and maximal symplectic representations. We relate them to cross ratios and thus deduce that they are displacing which means that their translation lengths are roughly controlled by the translations lengths on the Cayley graph. As a consequence, we show that the mapping class group acts properly on the space of representations and that the energy functional associated to such a representation is proper. This implies the existence...

After having given the general variational formula for the functionals indicated in the title, the critical points of the integral of the equi-affine curvature under area constraint and the critical points of the full-affine arc-length are studied in greater detail. Notice. An extended version of this article is available on arXiv:0912.4075.

We consider the problem of minimizing ${\int }_0^{\ell }\sqrt{{\xi }^2+K^2\left(s\right)}\mathrm{d}s$ ∫ 0 ℓ ξ 2 + K 2 ( s )   d s for a planar curve having fixed initial and final positions and directions. The total lengthℓ is free. Here s is the arclength parameter, K(s) is the curvature of the curve and ξ > 0 is a fixed constant. This problem comes from a model of geometry of vision due to Petitot, Citti and Sarti. We study existence of local and global minimizers for...

The left-invariant sub-Riemannian problem on the group of motions (rototranslations) of a plane SE(2) is considered. In the previous works [Moiseev and Sachkov, ESAIM: COCV, DOI: 10.1051/cocv/2009004; Sachkov, ESAIM: COCV, DOI: 10.1051/cocv/2009031], extremal trajectories were defined, their local and global optimality were studied. In this paper the global structure of the exponential mapping is described. On this basis an explicit characterization of the cut locus and Maxwell set is obtained....