Northwestern University
Evanston, Illinois, U. S. A.
Many interesting problems in the area of materials science require a good understanding of constrained variational problems. This work deals primarily with the minimization of energy functionals under manifold constraints. An explicit characterization of the effective energy for nonconvex constrained materials is presented in the case where the admissible sequence lies on the boundary of the unit sphere or the boundary of a C1 Manifold. Potential applications of this work are in liquid crystals, equilibria for ferromagnetic materials and thermochemical equilibria for coherent two-phase alloys.