Deformation concentration for martensitic microstructures in the limit of low volume fraction

We consider a singularly-perturbed nonconvex energy functional which arises in the study of microstructures in shape memory alloys. The scaling law for the minimal energy predicts a transition from a parameter regime in which uniform structures are favored, to a regime in which the formation of fine patterns is expected. We focus on the transition regime and derive the reduced model in the sense of \(\Gamma \)-convergence. The limit functional turns out to be similar to the Mumford–Shah functional with additional constraints on the jump set of admissible functions. One key ingredient in the proof is an approximation result for \(SBV^p\) functions whose jump sets have a prescribed orientation.