A note on the smoothness of energy-minimizing incompressible deformations

Abstract

In this note we prove that any $W^{1,2}$ mapping $u$ in the plane that minimizes an appropriate quasiconvex energy functional subject to the Jacobian constraint ${\rm det} \na u=1$ a.e., are necessarily Lipschitz. Furthermore we show that the minimizers corresponding to uniformly convex energy are affine and give an example of non-affine minimizers subject to affine boundary data corresponding to a convex energy. We also discuss the regularity issues in dimension greater than or equal to 3.