Optimal regularity of solutions to a singular cooperative system

Abstract

In the pioneer work of vectorial free boundary problems \cite[Adv. Math. 280 (2015)]{ASUW15}, Andersson, Shahgholian, Uraltseva, and Weiss investigated the regularity theory of solutions and the free boundary of a singular cooperative system \begin{equation*} Δ\mathbf{u} = \frac{\mathbf{u}}{|\mathbf{u}|} χ_{\{|\mathbf{u}|>0\}} \quad\text{in }Ω\subset\mathbb{R}^n, \qquad \mathbf{u}:Ω\longrightarrow \mathbb{R}^m, \qquad n,m\ge 2. \end{equation*} At the level of solutions, the boundedness of the right-hand side directly yields $W^{2,p}_{\mathrm{loc}}$ regularity for every $1<p<\infty$ by standard elliptic estimates, while the corresponding $W^{2,\infty}_{\mathrm{loc}}$ regularity question was explicitly left as an open problem on page~753 of that paper. In this paper, we give a positive answer by establishing optimal $W^{2,\infty}_{\mathrm{loc}}$ regularity through a scale-invariant interior Hessian estimate for every weak solution. Unlike the scalar case, the classical Alt--Caffarelli--Friedman monotonicity formula cannot be applied directly to the present system. Our proof instead combines a localized Newtonian potential decomposition with an explicit projection onto quadratic harmonic polynomials on the unit sphere, which isolates the symmetric trace-free quadratic part of the Hessian. A key new observation is that the resulting matrix coefficients satisfy an exact linear ordinary differential equations with constant coefficients on the logarithmic scale. The main novelty of this work lies in a so-called two-regime argument based on the competition between the affine and quadratic parts of the rescaled solution, together with a continuity argument that connects the two regimes and yields a uniform bound for the coefficient. The resulting a priori estimate provides an analytic basis for further study of the fine structure of the free boundary.