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Existence and uniqueness of minimizers of general least gradient problems

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Published/Copyright: May 1, 2015

Abstract

Motivated by problems arising in conductivity imaging, we prove existence, uniqueness, and comparison theorems – under certain sharp conditions – for minimizers of the general least gradient problem infuBVf(Ω)Ωφ(x,Du), where f:Ω is continuous, BVf(Ω):={vBV(Ω):limr0esssupyΩ,|x-y|<r|f(x)-v(y)|=0 for xΩ} and φ(x,ξ) is a function that, among other properties, is convex and homogeneous of degree 1 with respect to the ξ variable. In particular, we prove that if aC1,1(Ω) is bounded away from zero, then minimizers of the weighted least gradient problem infuBVfΩa|Du| are unique in BVf(Ω). We construct counterexamples to show that the regularity assumption aC1,1 is sharp, in the sense that it can not be replaced by aC1,α(Ω) with any α<1.

Funding statement: The first and third author were partially supported by NSERC Discovery Grants. The second author was partially supported by an NSERC Postdoctoral Fellowship.

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Ben Stephens for many helpful discussions. The third author wishes to thank the Mittag-Leffler Institute for their wonderful hospitality.

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Received: 2013-5-7
Published Online: 2015-5-1
Published in Print: 2018-1-1

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