Gradient estimates of solutions to the insulated conductivity problem in dimension greater than two

Abstract

We study the insulated conductivity problem with inclusions embedded in a bounded domain in $\mathbb{R}^n$. The gradient of solutions may blow up as $\varepsilon$, the distance between inclusions, approaches to $0$. An upper bound for the blow up rate was proved to be of order $\varepsilon^{-1/2}$. The upper bound was known to be sharp in dimension $n = 2$. However, whether this upper bound is sharp in dimension $n \ge 3$ has remained open. In this paper, we improve the upper bound in dimension $n \ge 3$ to be of order $\varepsilon^{-1/2 + \beta}$, for some $\beta > 0$.