The nonlocal Neumann problem

Abstract

The classical local Neumann problem is well studied and solutions of this problem lie, in general, in a Sobolev space. In this work, we focus on nonlocal Neumann problems with measurable, nonnegative kernels, whose solutions require less regularity assumptions. For kernels of this kind we formulate and study the weak formulation of the nonlocal Neumann problem and we investigate a nonlocal counterpart of the Sobolev space $H^{1}$ as well as a resulting nonlocal trace space. We further establish, mainly for symmetric kernels, various existence results for the weak solution of the Neumann problem and we discuss related necessary conditions. Both, homogeneous and nonhomogeneous Neumann boundary conditions are considered. In addition to that, we present a new weak formulation of a Robin problem, where we reformulate the Robin problem into a regional problem.