We review some recent results in quantitative stochastic homogenization for divergence-form, quasilinear elliptic equations. In particular, we are interested in obtaining $L^{\infty }$-type bounds on the gradient of solutions and thus giving a demonstration of the principle that solutions of equations with random coefficients have much better regularity (with overwhelming probability) than a general equation with non-constant coefficients.

In this paper we construct upper bounds for families of functionals of the form$$E_{\epsilon }\left(\phi \right):={\int }_{\Omega }\left({\epsilon \left|\nabla \phi \right|}^2+\frac{1}{\epsilon }W\left(\phi \right)\right)\mathrm{d}x+\frac{1}{\epsilon }{\int }_{{ℝ}^N}{\left|\nabla {\overline{H}}_{F\left(\phi \right)}\right|}^2\mathrm{d}x$$where Δ${\overline{H}}_u$ = div {${\chi }_{\Omega }$u}. Particular cases of such functionals arise in Micromagnetics. We also use our technique to construct upper bounds for functionals that appear in a variational formulation of the method of vanishing viscosity for conservation laws.

We prove an upper bound for the Aviles–Giga problem, which involves the minimization of the energy $E_{\epsilon }\left(v\right)=\epsilon {\int }_{\Omega }|{\nabla }^2{v|}^{2}dx+{\epsilon }^{-1}{\int }_{\Omega }{\left(1-\right|\nabla v|}^2{)}^{2}dx$ over $v\in H^2\left(\Omega \right)$, where $\epsilon >0$ is a small parameter. Given $v\in W^{1,\infty }\left(\Omega \right)$ such that $\nabla v\in BV$ and $\left|\nabla v\right|=1$ a.e., we construct a family $\left\{v_{\epsilon }\right\}$ satisfying: $v_{\epsilon }\to v$ in $W^{1,p}\left(\Omega \right)$ and $E_{\epsilon }\left(v_{\epsilon }\right)\to \frac{1}{3}{\int }_{J_{\nabla v}}{\left|{\nabla }^{+}v-{\nabla }^{-}v\right|}^{3}d{\mathscr{H}}^{N-1}$ as $\epsilon$ goes to 0.