Rigidity and flatness of the image of certain classes of mappings having tangential Laplacian

Hussien Abugirda, Birzhan Ayanbayev, Nikos Katzourakis

Published 2017-04-14Version 1

In this paper we consider the PDE system of vanishing normal projection of the Laplacian for $C^2$ maps $u : \mathbb{R}^n \supseteq \Omega \longrightarrow \mathbb{R}^N$: \[ [\![\mathrm{D} u]\!]^\bot \Delta u = 0 \ \, \text{ in }\Omega. \] This system has discontinuous coefficients and geometrically expresses the fact that the Laplacian is a vector field tangential to the image of the mapping. It arises as a constituent component of the $p$-Laplace system for all $p\in [2,\infty]$. For $p=\infty$, the $\infty$-Laplace system is the archetypal equation describing extrema of supremal functionals in vectorial Calculus of Variations in $L^\infty$. Herein we show that the image of a solution $u$ is piecewise affine if either the rank of $\mathrm{D} u$ is equal to one or $n=2$ and $u$ has additively separated form. As a consequence we obtain corresponding flatness results for $p$-Harmonic maps, $p\in [2,\infty]$.