Optimal lower exponent for the higher gradient integrability of solutions to two-phase elliptic equations in two dimensions

We study the higher gradient integrability of distributional solutions u to the equation \({{\mathrm{div}}}(\sigma \nabla u) = 0\) in dimension two, in the case when the essential range of \(\sigma \) consists of only two elliptic matrices, i.e., \(\sigma \in \{\sigma _1, \sigma _2\}\) a.e. in \(\Omega \). In Nesi et al. (Ann Inst H Poincaré Anal Non Linéaire 31(3):615–638, 2014), for every pair of elliptic matrices \(\sigma _1\) and \(\sigma _2\), exponents \(p_{\sigma _1,\sigma _2}\in (2,+\infty )\) and \(q_{\sigma _1,\sigma _2}\in (1,2)\) have been found so that if \(u\in W^{1,q_{\sigma _1,\sigma _2}}(\Omega )\) is solution to the elliptic equation then \(\nabla u\in L^{p_{\sigma _1,\sigma _2}}_{\mathrm{weak}}(\Omega )\) and the optimality of the upper exponent \(p_{\sigma _1,\sigma _2}\) has been proved. In this paper we complement the above result by proving the optimality of the lower exponent \(q_{\sigma _1,\sigma _2}\). Precisely, we show that for every arbitrarily small \(\delta \), one can find a particular microgeometry, i.e., an arrangement of the sets \(\sigma ^{-1}(\sigma _1)\) and \(\sigma ^{-1}(\sigma _2)\), for which there exists a solution u to the corresponding elliptic equation such that \(\nabla u \in L^{q_{\sigma _1,\sigma _2}-\delta }\), but \(\nabla u \notin L^{q_{\sigma _1,\sigma _2}}\). The existence of such optimal microgeometries is achieved by convex integration methods, adapting to the present setting the geometric constructions provided in Astala et al. (Ann Scuola Norm Sup Pisa Cl Sci 5(7):1–50, 2008) for the isotropic case.