Doubling and the two-dimensional critical valued Lagrangian phase

Abstract

In this paper, we establish interior Hessian and gradient estimates for the two-dimensional Lagrangian mean curvature equation when the phase changes signs, provided the gradient of the phase vanishes along its zero set. At the critical phase in two dimensions, the Jacobi inequality degenerates, preventing the use of higher-dimensional methods to obtain Hessian estimates. To address this difficulty, we introduce a modified doubling technique that applies to degenerate Jacobi inequalities and yields interior estimates.