We study the minimum energy configuration of a uniform distribution of negative charge subject to Coulomb repulsive self-interaction and attractive interaction with a fixed positively charged domain. After having established existence and uniqueness of a minimizing configuration, we prove charge neutrality and the complete screening of the Coulomb potential exerted by the positive charge, and w...

where Ω is an open bounded set of R and W and V are two non-negative continuous functions vanishing at α, β and α, β, respectively. In the previous functional, we fix a = 2 − p and u is a scalar density function, Tu denotes its trace on ∂Ω, d(x, ∂Ω) stands for the distance function to the boundary ∂Ω. We show that the singular limit of the energies Fε leads to a coupled problem of bulk and surf...

1. Liquid–Liquid Phase Transitions Consider a fluid confined into a container Ω ⊂ R . Assume that the total mass of the fluid is m, so that admissible density distributions u : Ω→ R satisfy the constraint ∫ Ω u(x) dx = m. The total energy is given by the functional u 7→ ∫ Ω W (u(x)) dx, where W : R→ [0,∞) is the energy per unit volume. Assume that W supports two phases a < b, that is, W is a do...

We present the first of two articles on the small volume fraction limit of a nonlocal Cahn–Hilliard functional introduced to model microphase separation of diblock copolymers. Here we focus attention on the sharp-interface version of the functional and consider a limit in which the volume fraction tends to zero but the number of minority phases (called particles) remains O(1). Using the languag...

We study, by means of Γ-convergence, the asymptotic behaviour of a variational problem modeling a dislocation ensemble moving on a slip plane through a discrete array of obstacles. The variational problem is a two dimensional phase transition type energy given by a non local term and a non linear potential which penalizes non integer values. In this paper we consider a regime corresponding to a...

We consider the counting rate estimation of an unknown radioactive source, which emits photons at times modeled by an homogeneous Poisson process. A spectrometer converts the energy of incoming photons into electrical pulses, whose number provides a rough estimate of the intensity of the Poisson process. When the activity of the source is high, a physical phenomenon known as pileup effect disto...

This note completely resolves the asymptotic development of order 2 by Γ-convergence of the mass-constrained Cahn–Hilliard functional, by showing that one of the critical assumptions of the authors’ previous work [10] is unnecessary.

Γ-convergence results for power-law functionals with variable exponents are obtained. The main motivation comes from the study of (first-failure) dielectric breakdown. Some connections with the generalization of the ∞-Laplace equation to the variable exponent setting are also explored. 2000 Mathematics Subject Classification:

We study variational problems with volume constraints (also called level set constraints) of the form