Besov regularity for a class of singular or degenerate elliptic equations

Abstract

Motivated by applications to congested traffic problems, we establish higher integrability results for the gradient of local weak solutions to the strongly degenerate or singular elliptic PDE $-\mathrm{div}\left((\vert\nabla u\vert-1)_{+}^{q-1}\frac{\nabla u}{\vert\nabla u\vert}\right)=f$, $\mathrm{in}\,\,\Omega$, where $\Omega$ is a bounded domain in $\mathbb{R}^{n}$ for $n\geq2$, $1<q<\infty$ and $\left(\,\cdot\,\right)_{+}$ stands for the positive part. We assume that the datum $f$ belongs to a suitable Sobolev or Besov space. The main novelty here is that we deal with the case of subquadratic growth, i.e. $1<q<2$, which has so far been neglected. In the latter case, we also prove the higher fractional differentiability of the solution to a variational problem, which is characterized by the above equation. For the sake of completeness, we finally give a Besov regularity result also in the case $q\geq2$.