A Lavrentiev phenomenon in the neo-Hookean model

Abstract: We exhibit a Lavrentiev gap phenomenon for the neo-Hookean energy in three-dimensional nonlinear elasticity. More precisely, we construct boundary data for which the infimum of the neo-Hookean energy over deformations satisfying a natural regularity and invertibility condition is strictly larger than the infimum over the weak $H^1$-closure of that class. The mechanism underlying the gap is a deformation with a dipole-type singularity.