Fractional Korn's inequalities without boundary conditions

D. Harutyunyan, T. Mengesha, H. Mikayelyan, J. M. Scott

Published 2023-02-28Version 1

This work establishes fractional analogues of Korn's first and second inequalities for vector fields in fractional Sobolev spaces defined over a bounded domain. The validity of the inequalities require no additional boundary condition, extending existing fractional Korn's inequalities that are only applicable for Sobolev vector fields satisfying zero Dirichlet boundary conditions. The domain of definition is required to have a $C^1$-boundary or, more generally, a Lipschitz boundary with small Lipschitz constant. We conjecture that the inequalities remain valid for vector fields defined over any Lipschitz domain. We support this claim by presenting a proof of the inequalities for vector fields defined over planar convex domains.