Beltrami operators, non--symmetric elliptic equations and quantitative Jacobian bounds

Abstract

In recent studies on the G-convergence of Beltrami operators, a number of issues arouse concerning injectivity properties of families of quasiconformal mappings. Bojarski, D'Onofrio, Iwaniec and Sbordone formulated a conjecture based on the existence of a so-called primary pair. Very recently, Bojarski proved the existence of one such pair. We provide a general, constructive, procedure for obtaining a new rich class of such primary pairs. This proof is obtained as a slight adaptation of previous work by the authors concerning the nonvanishing of the Jacobian of pairs of solutions of elliptic equations in divergence form in the plane. It is proven here that the results previously obtained when the coefficient matrix is symmetric also extend to the non-symmetric case. We also prove a much stronger result giving a quantitative bound for the Jacobian determinant of the so-called \emph{periodic} $\sigma$-harmonic sense preserving homeomorphisms of $\mathbb C$ onto itself.