Non maximal cyclically monotone graphs and construction of a bipotential for the Coulomb's dry friction law

Abstract

We show a surprising connexion between a property of the inf convolution of a family of convex lower semicontinuous functions and the fact that the intersection of maximal cyclically monotone graphs is the critical set of a bipotential. We then extend the results from arXiv:math/0608424v4 to bipotentials convex covers, generalizing the notion of a bi-implicitly convex lagrangian cover. As an application we prove that the bipotential related to Coulomb's friction law is related to a specific bipotential convex cover with the property that any graph of the cover is non maximal cyclically monotone.