Singular perturbations models in phase transitions for anisotropic higher-order materials

Abstract: We discuss a model for phase transitions in which a double-well potential is singularly perturbed by possibly several terms involving different, arbitrarily high orders of derivation. We study by $\Gamma$-convergence the asymptotic behaviour as $\varepsilon\to 0$ of the functionals \begin{equation*} F_\varepsilon(u):=\int_\Omega \Bigl[\frac{1}{\varepsilon}W(u)+\sum_{\ell=1}^{k}q_\ell\varepsilon^{2\ell-1}|\nabla^{(\ell)}u|_\ell^2\Bigr]\,dx, \qquad u\in H^k(\Omega), \end{equation*} for fixed $k>1$ integer, addressing also to the case in which the coefficients $q_1,...,q_{k-1}$ are negative and $|\cdot|_\ell$ is any norm on the space of symmetric $\ell$-tensors for each $\ell\in{1,...,k}$. The negativity of the coefficients leads to the lack of a priori bounds on the functionals; such issue is overcome by proving a nonlinear interpolation inequality. With this inequality at our disposal, a compactness result is achieved by resorting to the paper [10]. A further difficulty is the presence of general tensor norms which carry anisotropies, making standard slicing arguments not suitable. We prove that the $\Gamma$-limit is finite only on sharp interfaces and that it equals an anisotropic perimeter, with a surface energy density described by a cell formula.