Mean-field games (MFGs) and the best-reply strategy (BRS) are two methods of describing competitive optimisation of systems of interacting agents. The latter can be interpreted as an approximation of the respective MFG system. In this paper, we present an analysis and comparison of the two approaches in the stationary case. We provide novel existence and uniqueness results for the stationary boundary value problems related to the MFG and BRS formulations, and we present an analytical and numerical comparison of the two paradigms in some specific modelling situations.

Quasiperiodic media is a class of almost periodic media which is generated from periodic media through a ‘cut and project’ procedure. Quasiperiodic media displays some extraordinary optical, electronic and conductivity properties which call for the development of methods to analyse their microstructures and effective behaviour. In this paper, we develop the method of Bloch wave homogenisation for quasiperiodic media. Bloch waves are typically defined through a direct integral decomposition of periodic operators. A suitable direct integral decomposition is not available for almost periodic operators. To remedy this, we lift a quasiperiodic operator to a degenerate periodic operator in higher dimensions. Approximate Bloch waves are obtained for a regularised version of the degenerate operator. Homogenised coefficients for quasiperiodic media are obtained from the first Bloch eigenvalue of the regularised operator in the limit of regularisation parameter going to zero. A notion of quasiperiodic Bloch transform is defined and employed to obtain homogenisation limit for an equation with highly oscillating quasiperiodic coefficients.

We consider the equation Δu = Vu in the half-space ${\open R}_ + ^d $ , d ⩾ 2 where V has certain periodicity properties. In particular, we show that such equations cannot have non-trivial superexponentially decaying solutions. As an application this leads to a new proof for the absolute continuity of the spectrum of particular periodic Schrödinger operators. The equation Δu = Vu is studied as part of a broader class of elliptic evolution equations.

We demonstrate that Radon measures which arise as the limit of the Modica-Mortola measures associated with phase-fields with uniformly bounded diffuse area and Willmore energy may be singular at the boundary of a domain and discuss implications for practical applications. We furthermore give partial regularity results for the phase-fields uε at the boundary in terms of boundary conditions and counterexamples without boundary conditions.

We prove a Carleman estimate for elliptic second-order partial differential expressions with Lipschitz continuous coefficients. The Carleman estimate is valid for any complex-valued function u ∈ W2,2 with support in a punctured ball of arbitrary radius. The novelty of this Carleman estimate is that we establish an explicit dependence on the Lipschitz and ellipticity constants, the dimension of the space and the radius of the ball. In particular, we provide a uniform and quantitative bound on the weight function for a class of elliptic operators given explicitly in terms of ellipticity and Lipschitz constant.

We consider the unique recovery of a non-compactly supported and non-periodic perturbation of a Schrödinger operator in an unbounded cylindrical domain, also called waveguide, from boundary measurements. More precisely, we prove recovery of a general class of electric potentials from the partial Dirichlet-to-Neumann map, where the Dirichlet data is supported on slightly more than half of the boundary and the Neumann data is taken on the other half of the boundary. We apply this result in different contexts including recovery of some general class of non-compactly supported coefficients from measurements on a bounded subset and recovery of an electric potential, supported on an unbounded cylinder, of a Schrödinger operator in a slab.

In this paper we study a class of second order fully nonlinear elliptic equations containing gradient terms on compact Hermitian manifolds and obtain a priori estimates under proper assumptions close to optimal. The analysis developed here should be useful to deal with other Hessian equations containing gradient terms in other contexts.

Let L be a one-to-one operator of type ω in L2(ℝn), with ω∈[0, π/2), which has a bounded holomorphic functional calculus and satisfies the Davies–Gaffney estimates. Let p(·): ℝn→(0, 1] be a variable exponent function satisfying the globally log-Hölder continuous condition. In this article, the authors introduce the variable Hardy space $H_L^{p(\cdot )} ({\open R}^n)$ associated with L. By means of variable tent spaces, the authors establish the molecular characterization of $H_L^{p(\cdot )} ({\open R}^n)$ . Then the authors show that the dual space of $H_L^{p(\cdot )} ({\open R}^n)$ is the bounded mean oscillation (BMO)-type space ${\rm BM}{\rm O}_{p(\cdot ),{\kern 1pt} L^ * }({\open R}^n)$ , where L* denotes the adjoint operator of L. In particular, when L is the second-order divergence form elliptic operator with complex bounded measurable coefficients, the authors obtain the non-tangential maximal function characterization of $H_L^{p(\cdot )} ({\open R}^n)$ and show that the fractional integral L−α for α∈(0, (1/2)] is bounded from $H_L^{p(\cdot )} ({\open R}^n)$ to $H_L^{q(\cdot )} ({\open R}^n)$ with (1/p(·))−(1/q(·))=2α/n, and the Riesz transform ∇ L−1/2 is bounded from $H_L^{p(\cdot )} ({\open R}^n)$ to the variable Hardy space Hp(·)(ℝn).

In this paper we establish the existence and multiplicity of multi-bump nodal solutions for the class of problems

where λ ∈ (0, ∞), f is a continuous function with exponential critical growth and V : ℝ2 → ℝ is a continuous function verifying some hypotheses.

We study the system of Maxwell equations for a periodic composite dielectric medium with components whose dielectric permittivities ${\it\epsilon}$ have a high degree of contrast between each other. We assume that the ratio between the permittivities of the components with low and high values of ${\it\epsilon}$ is of the order ${\it\eta}^{2}$ , where ${\it\eta}>0$ is the period of the medium. We determine the asymptotic behaviour of the electromagnetic response of such a medium in the “homogenization limit”, as ${\it\eta}\rightarrow 0$ , and derive the limit system of Maxwell equations in $\mathbb{R}^{3}$ . Our results extend a number of conclusions of a paper by Zhikov [On gaps in the spectrum of some divergent elliptic operators with periodic coefficients. St. Petersburg Math. J.16(5) (2004), 719–773] to the case of the full system of Maxwell equations.

In this paper, we discuss the isometric embedding problem in hyperbolic space with nonnegative extrinsic curvature. We prove a priori bounds for the trace of the second fundamental form $H$ and extend the result to $n$ -dimensions. We also obtain an estimate for the gradient of the smaller principal curvature in 2 dimensions.

This article is to discuss the bilinear and linear immersed finite element (IFE) solutions generated from the algebraic multigrid solver for both stationary and moving interface problems. For the numerical methods based on finite difference formulation and a structured mesh independent of the interface, the stiffness matrix of the linear system is usually not symmetric positive-definite, which demands extra efforts to design efficient multigrid methods. On the other hand, the stiffness matrix arising from the IFE methods are naturally symmetric positive-definite. Hence the IFE-AMG algorithm is proposed to solve the linear systems of the bilinear and linear IFE methods for both stationary and moving interface problems. The numerical examples demonstrate the features of the proposed algorithms, including the optimal convergence in both L2 and semi-H1 norms of the IFE-AMG solutions, the high efficiency with proper choice of the components and parameters of AMG, the influence of the tolerance and the smoother type of AMG on the convergence of the IFE solutions for the interface problems, and the relationship between the cost and the moving interface location.

We prove a new global stability estimate for the Gel’fand–Calderón inverse problem on a two-dimensional bounded domain. Specifically, the inverse boundary value problem for the equation ${- }\Delta \psi + v\hspace{0.167em} \psi = 0$ on $D$ is analysed, where $v$ is a smooth real-valued potential of conductivity type defined on a bounded planar domain $D$ . The main feature of this estimate is that it shows that the smoother a potential is, the more stable its reconstruction is. Furthermore, the stability is proven to depend exponentially on the smoothness, in a sense to be made precise. The same techniques yield a similar estimate for the Calderón problem for electrical impedance tomography.

This work is a follow-up to our previous work. It extends and complements, both theoretically and experimentally, the results presented there. Under consideration is the homogenization of a model of a weakly random heterogeneous material. The material consists of a reference periodic material randomly perturbed by another periodic material, so that its homogenized behavior is close to that of the reference material. We consider laws for the random perturbations more general than in. We prove the validity of an asymptotic expansion in a certain class of settings. We also extend the formal approach introduced in. Our perturbative approach shares common features with a defect-type theory of solid state physics. The computational efficiency of the approach is demonstrated.

In this paper we obtain a Hermite-Hadamard type inequality for a class of subharmonic functions. Our proofs rely essentially on the properties of elliptic partial differential equations of second order. Our study extends some recent results from [1], [2] and [6].

On the basis of some new Liouville theorems, under suitable conditions, a priori estimates are obtained of positive solutions of the problem \[-\Delta _pu=\lambda u^{\alpha }-a(x)u^q\quad \mbox{in}\;\Omega,\qquad u|_{\partial \Omega }=0,\] where $\Omega \subset {\mathbb{R}}^N$ ($N\geq 2$) is a bounded smooth domain, $p>1$ and λ is a parameter, α, q are given constants such that $p-1<\alpha <p^*-1$, $\alpha <q$, $p^*=Np/(N-p)$ if $N > p$ and $p^*=\infty $ when $N\leq p$, and $a(x)$ is a continuous nonnegative function. Making use of the Leray–Schauder degree of a compact mapping and a priori estimates, the paper finds that the problem above possesses at least one positive solution. It also discusses the corresponding perturbed problem, where $a(x)$ is replaced by $a(x)+\epsilon$, $\epsilon>0$. The results are strikingly different from those obtained for the case $\alpha=p-1$.

The theory of mappings of finite distortion has arisen out of a need to extend the ideas and applications of the classical theory of quasiconformal mappings to the degenerate elliptic setting where one finds concrete applications in non-linear elasticity and the calculus of variations.

In this paper we initiate the study of extremal problems for mappings with finite distortion and extend the theory of extremal quasiconformal mappings by considering integral averages of the distortion function instead of its supremum norm. For instance, we show the following. Suppose that $f_o$ is a homeomorphism of the circle with $f_{o}^{-1} \in {\cal W}^{1/2, 2}$. Then there is a unique extremal extension to the disk which is a real analytic diffeomorphism with non-vanishing Jacobian determinant. The condition on $f_o$ is sharp.

Classically the mapping $f_o$ is assumed to be quasisymmetric. Then there is an extremal quasiconformal mapping with boundary values $f_o$, but it is not always unique and it is seldom smooth. Indeed, even when $f_o$ is quasisymmetric, the ${\cal L}^1$-minimiser for the distortion function will almost never be quasiconformal.

We further find that there are many new and unexpected phenomena concerning existence, uniqueness and regularity for these extremal problems where the functionals are polyconvex but typically not convex. These seem to differ markedly from phenomena observed when studying multi-well type functionals.

We prove an uniform Hölder continuity of the resolvent of the Laplace-Beltrami operator on the real axis for a class of asymptotically Euclidean Riemannian manifolds. As an application we extend a result of Burq on the behaviour of the local energy of solutions to the wave equation.

We show that the Kato conjecture is true for m-accretive operators with highly singular coefficients. For operators of the form A = *F, where formally corresponds to d/dx + zδ on L2 (R), we prove that Dom (A1/2) = Dom() = e-zHH1(R) where H is the Heavysied function. By adapting recent methods of Auscher and Tchamitchian, we characterize Dom (A) in terms of an unconditional wavelet basis for L2(R).