Differentiability of effective fronts in the continuous setting in two dimensions

Abstract

We study the effective front associated with first-order front propagations in two dimensions ($n=2$) in the periodic setting with continuous coefficients. Our main result says that that the boundary of the effective front is differentiable at every irrational point. Equivalently, the stable norm associated with a continuous ${\mathbb{Z}}^2$-periodic Riemannian metric is differentiable at irrational points. This conclusion was obtained decades ago for smooth metrics ([3,5]). To the best of our knowledge, our result provides the first nontrivial property of the effective fronts in the continuous setting, which is the standard assumption in the PDE theory. Combining with the sufficiency result in [12], our result implies that for continuous coefficients, a polygon could be an effective front if and only if it is centrally symmetric with rational vertices and nonempty interior.

27 pages, 9 figures. Updated version with additional references and expository parts