Energy Space Newton Differentiability for Solution Maps of Unilateral and Bilateral Obstacle Problems

Abstract: We prove that the solution operator of the classical unilateral obstacle problem on a nonempty open bounded set $\Omega \subset \mathbb{R}^d$, $d \in \mathbb{N}$, is Newton differentiable as a function from $L^p(\Omega)$ to $H_0^1(\Omega)$ whenever $\max(1, 2d/(d+2)) < p \leq \infty$. By exploiting this Newton differentiability property, results on angled subspaces in $H^{-1}(\Omega)$, and a formula for orthogonal projections onto direct sums, we further show that the solution map of the classical bilateral obstacle problem is Newton differentiable as a function from $L^p(\Omega)$ to $H_0^1(\Omega)\cap L^q(\Omega)$ whenever $\max(1, d/2) < p \leq \infty$ and $1 \leq q <\infty$. For both the unilateral and the bilateral case, we provide explicit formulas for the Newton derivative. As a concrete application example for our results, we consider the numerical solution of an optimal control problem with $H_0^1(\Omega)$-controls and box-constraints by means of a semismooth Newton method.