Stability estimates in $H^1_0$ for solutions of elliptic equations in varying domains

Abstract

We consider second-order uniformly elliptic operators subject to Dirichlet boundary conditions. Such operators are considered on a bounded domain $\Omega$ and on the domain $\phi(\Omega)$ resulting from $\Omega$ by means of a bi-Lipschitz map $\phi$. We consider the solutions $u$ and $\tilde u$ of the corresponding elliptic equations with the same right-hand side $f\in L^2(\Omega\cup\phi(\Omega))$. Under certain assumptions we estimate the difference $\|\nabla\tilde u-\nabla u\|_{L^2(\Omega\cup\phi(\Omega))}$ in terms of certain measure of vicinity of $\phi$ to the identity map. For domains within a certain class this provides estimates in terms of the Lebesgue measure of the symmetric difference of $\phi(\Omega)$ and $\Omega$, that is $|\phi(\Omega)\triangle \Omega|$. We provide an example which shows that the estimates obtained are in a certain sense sharp.