Korn’s inequality and John domains

Abstract

Let \(\Omega \subset \mathbb {R}^n\), \(n\ge 2\), be a bounded domain satisfying the separation property. We show that the following conditions are equivalent: (i) \(\Omega \) is a John domain; (ii) for a fixed \(p\in (1,\infty )\), the Korn inequality holds for each \(\mathbf {u}\in W^{1,p}(\Omega ,\mathbb {R}^n)\) satisfying \(\int _\Omega \frac{\partial u_i}{\partial x_j}-\frac{\partial u_j}{\partial x_i}\,dx=0\), \(1\le i,j\le n\), $$\begin{aligned} \Vert D\mathbf {u}\Vert _{L^p(\Omega )}\le C_K(\Omega , p)\Vert \epsilon (\mathbf {u})\Vert _{L^p(\Omega )}; \qquad (K_{p}) \end{aligned}$$ (ii’) for all \(p\in (1,\infty )\), \((K_p)\) holds on \(\Omega \); (iii) for a fixed \(p\in (1,\infty )\), for each \(f\in L^p(\Omega )\) with vanishing mean value on \(\Omega \), there exists a solution \(\mathbf {v}\in W^{1,p}_0(\Omega ,\mathbb {R}^n)\) to the equation \(\mathrm {div}\,\mathbf {v}=f\) with $$\begin{aligned} \Vert \mathbf {v}\Vert _{W^{1,p}(\Omega ,\mathbb {R}^n)}\le C(\Omega , p)\Vert f\Vert _{L^p(\Omega )};\qquad (DE_p) \end{aligned}$$ (iii’) for all \(p\in (1,\infty )\), \((DE_p)\) holds on \(\Omega \). For domains satisfying the separation property, in particular, for finitely connected domains in the plane, our result provides a geometric characterization of the Korn inequality, and gives positive answers to a question raised by Costabel and Dauge (Arch Ration Mech Anal 217(3):873–898, 2015) and a question raised by Russ (Vietnam J Math 41:369–381, 2013). For the plane, our result is best possible in the sense that, there exist infinitely connected domains which are not John but support Korn’s inequality.