Perturbation of well-posedness and layer potentials for higher-order elliptic systems with rough coefficients

Abstract: In this paper we study boundary value problems for higher order elliptic differential operators in divergence form. We consider the two closely related topics of inhomogeneous problems and problems with boundary data in fractional smoothness spaces. We establish $L^\infty$ perturbative results concerning well posedness of inhomogeneous problems with boundary data in fractional smoothness spaces. Combined with earlier known results, this allows us to establish new well posedness results for second order operators whose coefficients are close to being real and t-independent and for fourth-order operators close to the biharmonic operator.