2016, Cozzi, Matteo, Dipierro, Serena, Valdinoci, Enrico

This paper contains three types of results: the construction of ground state solutions for a long-range Ising model whose interfaces stay at a bounded distance from any given hyperplane, the construction of nonlocal minimal surfaces which stay at a bounded distance from any given hyperplane, the reciprocal approximation of ground states for long-range Ising models and nonlocal minimal surfaces. In particular, we establish the existence of ground state solutions for long-range Ising models with planelike interfaces, which possess scale invariant properties with respect to the periodicity size of the environment. The range of interaction of the Hamiltonian is not necessarily assumed to be finite and also polynomial tails are taken into account (i.e. particles can interact even if they are very far apart the one from the other). In addition, we provide a rigorous bridge between the theory of long-range Ising models and that of nonlocal minimal surfaces, via some precise limit result.

2016, Dipierro, Serena, Novaga, Matteo, Valdinoci, Enrico

We investigate the shape of critical points for a free energy consisting of a nonlocal perimeter plus a nonlocal repulsive term. In particular, we prove that a volume-constrained critical point is necessarily a ball if its volume is sufficiently small with respect to its isodiametric ratio, thus extending a result previously known only for global minimizers. We also show that, at least in one-dimension, there exist critical points with arbitrarily small volume and large isodiametric ratio. This example shows that a constraint on the diameter is, in general, necessary to establish the radial symmetry of the critical points.