Young functions on varifolds. Part I. Functional analytic foundations

Abstract

The series of papers is devoted to the study of convergence for pairs of surfaces and smooth functions thereon. We model such pairs with varifolds and multiple-valued functions to capture their limits. In the present paper, we study Young functions, a measure-theoretic approach to multiple-valued functions, and the graph measures associated with pairs of measures (in particular, varifolds) and Young functions. This setting allows us to model the convergence of pairs of surfaces and functions thereon via the weak convergence of their associated graph measures, and a compactness theorem follows immediately. As a prerequisite for the concepts of differentiability for Young functions in the upcoming papers, we introduce and investigate several test function spaces.