Displacement convexity and minimal fronts at phase boundaries

Abstract

We show that certain free energy functionals that are not convex with respect to the usual convex structure on their domain of definition, are strictly convex in the sense of displacement convexity under a natural change of variables. We use this to show that in certain cases, the only critical points of these functionals are minimizers. This approach based on displacement convexity permits us to treat multicomponent systems as well as single component systems. The developments produce new examples of displacement convex functionals, and, in the multi-component setting, jointly displacement convex functionals.