General least gradient problems with obstacle

Abstract

We study existence, structure, uniqueness and regularity of solutions of the obstacle problem

$$\begin{aligned} \inf _{u\in BV_f(\Omega )}\int _{\Omega }\phi (x,Du), \end{aligned}$$

where $BV_f(\Omega )=\{u\in BV({\mathbb {R}}^n): u\ge \psi \text { in }\Omega \text { and } u|_{\partial \Omega }=f|_{\partial \Omega }\}$, $f \in W^{1,1}_0({\mathbb {R}}^n)$, $\psi$ is the obstacle, and $\phi (x,\xi )$ is a convex, continuous and homogeneous function of degree one with respect to the $\xi$ variable. We show that every minimizer of this problem is also a minimizer of the least gradient problem

$$\begin{aligned} \inf _{u\in {\mathcal {A}}_f(\Omega )}\int _{{\mathbb {R}}^n}\phi (x,Du), \end{aligned}$$

where ${\mathcal {A}}_f(\Omega )=\{u\in BV(\Omega ): u\ge \psi , \text { and } u=f \text { in }\Omega ^c\}$. Moreover, there exists a vector field T with $\nabla \cdot T \le 0$ in $\Omega$ which determines the structure of all minimizers of these two problems, and T is divergence free on $\{x\in \Omega : u(x)>\psi (x)\}$ for any minimizer u. We also present uniqueness and regularity results that are based on maximum principles for minimal surfaces. Since minimizers of the least gradient problems with obstacle do not hit small enough obstacles, the results presented in this paper extend several results in the literature about least gradient problems without obstacle.