An integrability result for $L^p$-vectorfields in the plane

Abstract

We prove that if $p>1$ then the divergence of a $L^p$-vectorfield $V$ on a 2-dimensional domain $\Omega$ is the boundary of an integral 1-current, if and only if $V$ can be represented as the rotated gradient $\nabla^\perp u$ for a $W^{1,p}$-map $u:\Omega\to S^1$. Such result extends to exponents $p>1$ the result on distributional Jacobians of Alberti, Baldo, Orlandi.