Lower semicontinuity and relaxation of nonlocal $$L^\infty $$-functionals

Abstract

AbstractWe study variational problems involving nonlocal supremal functionals $$\begin{aligned} L^\infty (\Omega ;{\mathbb {R}}^m) \ni u\mapsto \mathrm{ess sup}_{(x,y)\in \Omega \times \Omega } W(u(x), u(y)), \end{aligned}$$ L ∞ ( Ω ; R m ) ∋ u ↦ ess sup ( x , y ) ∈ Ω × Ω W ( u ( x ) , u ( y ) ) , where $$\Omega \subset \mathbb {R}^n$$ Ω ⊂ R n is a bounded, open set and $$W:\mathbb {R}^m\times \mathbb {R}^m\rightarrow \mathbb {R}$$ W : R m × R m → R is a suitable function. Motivated by existence theory via the direct method, we identify a necessary and sufficient condition for $$L^\infty $$ L ∞ -weak$$^*$$ ∗ lower semicontinuity of these functionals, namely, separate level convexity of a symmetrized and suitably diagonalized version of the supremands. More generally, we show that the supremal structure of the functionals is preserved during the process of relaxation. The analogous statement in the related context of double-integral functionals was recently shown to be false. Our proof relies substantially on the connection between supremal and indicator functionals. This allows us to recast the relaxation problem into characterizing weak$$^*$$ ∗ closures of a class of nonlocal inclusions, which is of independent interest. To illustrate the theory, we determine explicit relaxation formulas for examples of functionals with different multi-well supremands.