Entire minimizers of Allen-Cahn systems with sub-quadratic potentials

TL;DR

This paper investigates entire minimizers of Allen-Cahn systems with sub-quadratic potentials, focusing on existence, free boundaries, and phase connections, without addressing regularity issues.

Contribution

It establishes the existence of entire solutions connecting minima with free boundaries in systems with sub-quadratic potentials, including symmetric and non-symmetric cases.

Findings

Existence of entire solutions connecting minima.

Presence of free boundaries related to dead cores.

Quantification of dead core sizes.

Abstract

We study entire minimizers of the Allen-Cahn systems. The specific feature of our systems are potentials having a finite number of global minima, with sub-quadratic behaviour locally near their minima. The corresponding formal Euler-Lagrange equations are supplemented with free boundaries. We do not study regularity issues but focus on qualitative aspects. We show the existence of entire solutions in an equivariant setting connecting the minima of $ W $ at infinity, thus modeling many coexisting phases, possessing free boundaries and minimizing energy in the symmetry class. We also present a very modest result of existence of free boundaries under no symmetry hypotheses. The existence of a free boundary can be related to the existence of a specific sub-quadratic feature, a dead core, whose size is also quantified.