For energy functionals composed of competing short- and long-range interactions, minimizers are often conjectured to form essentially periodic patterns on some intermediate lengthscale. However, not many detailed structural results or proofs of periodicity are known in dimensions larger than 1. We study a functional composed of the attractive, local interfacial energy of charges concentrated on a hyperplane and the energy of the electric field generated by these charges in the full space, which can be interpreted as a repulsive, non-local functional of the charges. We follow the approach of Alberti-Choksi-Otto and prove that the energy of minimizers of this functional is uniformly distributed on cubes intersecting the hyperplane, which are sufficiently large with respect to the intrinsic lengthscale.
This is a joint work with A. Julia and F. Otto.