Obstacle Problems with Double Boundary Condition for Least Gradient Functions in Metric Measure Spaces

Abstract

AbstractIn the setting of a metric space equipped with a doubling measure supporting a (1, 1)-Poincaré inequality, we study the problem of minimizing the BV-energy in a bounded domain $$\Omega $$ Ω of functions bounded between two obstacle functions inside $$\Omega $$ Ω , and whose trace lies between two prescribed functions on the boundary. If the class of candidate functions is nonempty, we show that solutions exist for continuous obstacles and continuous boundary data when $$\Omega $$ Ω is a uniform domain whose boundary is of positive mean curvature in the sense of Lahti, Malý, Shanmugalingam, and Speight (2019). While such solutions are not unique in general, we show the existence of unique minimal solutions. Since candidate functions need not agree outside of the domain, standard compactness arguments fail to provide existence of weak solutions as they are defined for the problem with single boundary condition. To overcome this, we introduce a class of $$ \varepsilon $$ ε -weak solutions as an intermediate step. Our existence results generalize those of Ziemer and Zumbrun (1999), who studied this problem in the Euclidean setting with a single obstacle and single boundary condition.