Deep quench approximation and optimal control of general Cahn–Hilliard systems with fractional operators and double obstacle potentials

Recently, the authors derived well-posedness and regularity results for general evolutionary operator equations having the structure of a Cahn–Hilliard system. The involved operators were fractional versions in the spectral sense of general linear operators that have compact resolvents and are densely defined, unbounded, selfadjoint, and monotone in a Hilbert space of functions. The class of admissible double-well potentials driving the phase separation process modeled by the Cahn–Hilliard system included polynomial, logarithmic, and double obstacle nonlinearities. In a subsequent paper, distributed optimal control problems for such systems were investigated, where only differentiable polynomial and logarithmic potentials were admitted. Existence of optimizers and first-order optimality conditions were derived. In this paper, these results are complemented for nondifferentiable double obstacle nonlinearities. It is well known that for such nonlinearities standard constraint qualifications to construct Lagrange multipliers cannot be applied. To overcome this difficulty, we follow the so-called "deep quench" method, which has proved to be a powerful tool in optimal control problems with double obstacle potentials. We give a general convergence analysis of the deep quench approximation, including an error estimate, and demonstrate that its use leads to meaningful first-order necessary optimality conditions.