Universite Toulouse III - Paul Sabatier

We consider vector-valued maps which minimize an energy with two terms: an elastic term penalizing high gradients, and a potential term penalizing values far away from a fixed submanifold N. In the scaling limit where the second term is dominant, minimizers converge to maps with values into the manifold N. If the elastic term is the classical Dirichlet energy (i.e. the squared L^2-norm of the gradient), classical tools show that this convergence is uniform away from a singular set where the energy concentrates. Some physical models (as e.g. liquid crystal models) include however more general elastic energies (still coercive and quadratic in the gradient, but less symmetric), for which these classical tools do not apply. We will present a new strategy to obtain nevertheless this uniform convergence. This is a joint work with Andres Contreras.