Kari Astala

We consider a refinement of the usual quasiconvexity condition of Morrey in two dimensions that allows us to prove lower semicontinuity and existence of minimizers for a class of functionals which are unbounded as the determinant vanishes and are non-polyconvex in general. This notion, that we call principal quasiconvexity, arose from the planar theory of quasiconformal mappings and mappings of finite distortion. We compare it with other quasiconvexity conditions that have appeared in the literature and provide a number of concrete examples of principally quasiconvex functionals that are not polyconvex. We also describe local conditions which combined with quasiconvexity yield principal quasiconvexity. The Stoilow factorization, that in the context of maps of integrable distortion was developed by Iwaniec and Šverák, plays a prominent role in our approach.

In this work we study the variational problem associated to dimer models, a class of models from integrable probability and statistical mechanics in dimension two which have been the focus of intense research efforts over the last decades. These models give rise to an infinite family of non-differentiable functionals on Lipschitz functions with gradient constraint, determined by solutions of the Dirichlet problem on compact convex polygons for a class of Monge-Amp\`ere equations. We settle a number or outstanding open questions for this infinite class functionals. In particular we prove a complete classification of the regularity of minimizers, also known as height functions, for all dimer models for a natural class of polygonal (simply or multiply connected) domains much studied in numerical simulations and elsewhere. Our classification in particular implies that the Pokrovsky-Talapov law holds for all dimer models at a generic point on the frozen boundary and in addition shows a very strong local rigidity of dimer models which can be interpreted as a geometric universality result. Furthermore, we give a complete classification of the regularity of the associated free boundary, also known in the literature as frozen boundary or arctic curves and prove that they are all algebraic curves. The lack of differentiability of the functionals is intimately connected to the boundary behaviour of the solutions to the Monge-Amp\`ere equations and we prove a complete classification for these, of independent interest.

We provide Schauder estimates for nonlinear Beltrami equations and lower bounds of the Jacobians for homeomorphic solutions. The results were announced in arXiv:1412.4046 but here we give detailed proofs.