Variational stabilization of degenerate p‐elasticae

Abstract A new stabilization phenomenon induced by degenerate diffusion is discovered in the context of pinned planar ‐elasticae. It was known that in the nondegenerate regime , including the classical case of Euler's elastica, there are no local minimizers other than unique global minimizers. Here we prove that, in stark contrast, in the degenerate regime there emerge uncountably many local minimizers with diverging energy.