Let be a bounded, open domain in -dimensionalEuclidean space and let denote the Sobolev space of -times weakly differentiable functions with weak derivatives in . Assume that satisfies the -extension property, i.e., that there exists a
bounded linear operator
such that for all .
Let L be a linear partial differential operator of even order 2k, written in divergence form
and suppose that L is uniformly elliptic, i.e., there exists a constant θ > 0 such that
Then Gårding's inequality holds: there exist constants C > 0 and G ≥ 0
where
is the bilinear form associated to the operator L.
Application: the Laplace operator and the Poisson problem
Be careful, in this application, Garding's Inequality seems useless here as the final result is a direct consequence of Poincaré's Inequality, or Friedrich Inequality. (See talk on the article).
As a simple example, consider the
Poisson equation
where Ω is a bounded Lipschitz domain in Rn. The corresponding weak form of the problem is to find u in the Sobolev space H01(Ω) such that
where
The
Lax–Milgram lemma
ensures that if the bilinear form B is both continuous and elliptic with respect to the norm on H01(Ω), then, for each f ∈ L2(Ω), a unique solution u must exist in H01(Ω). The hypotheses of Gårding's inequality are easy to verify for the Laplace operator Δ, so there exist constants C and G ≥ 0
Applying the Poincaré inequality allows the two terms on the right-hand side to be combined, yielding a new constant K > 0 with
which is precisely the statement that B is elliptic. The continuity of B is even easier to see: simply apply the Cauchy–Schwarz inequality and the fact that the Sobolev norm is controlled by the L2 norm of the gradient.
References
Renardy, Michael; Rogers, Robert C. (2004). An introduction to partial differential equations. Texts in Applied Mathematics 13 (Second ed.). New York: Springer-Verlag. p. 356.