Optimizing the Principal Coefficient of Elliptic Equations using $L^p$-regularity, $p < \infty$

Abstract

We study coefficient identification problems for elliptic partial differential equations with total variation regularization and control constraints. Existing related literature relies on continuity and differentiability properties of the control-to-state operator with respect to the $L^\infty$-norm. While this is sufficient for deriving optimality conditions, it is not well-suited for numerical algorithms, as it neglects the spatial extent of perturbations and leads to a qualitative discrepancy compared to $L^q$-norms with $q < \infty$. In this work, we address this gap by exploiting $W^{1,s}$-regularity results to establish differentiability properties of the control-to-state operator with respect to $L^q$-norms for finite $q$. Based on this framework, we derive first- and second-order differentiability results for the reduced objective functional and establish first-order optimality conditions involving a restricted subdifferential characterization of the total variation seminorm and corresponding regularity of the associated multipliers. Building on this, we analyze a nonsmooth trust-region method based on an $L^r$-trust region for $r > 0.5 q$ and prove its convergence to first-order stationary points.