TY - JOUR T1 - Higher order quasiconvexity reduces to quasiconvexity JF - Arch. Ration. Mech. Anal. 171 (2004) 55-81 Y1 - 2004 A1 - Gianni Dal Maso A1 - Irene Fonseca A1 - Giovanni Leoni A1 - Massimiliano Morini AB - In this paper it is shown that higher order quasiconvex functions suitable in the variational treatment of problems involving second derivatives may be extended to the space of all matrices as classical quasiconvex functions. Precisely, it is proved that a smooth strictly 2-quasiconvex function with p-growth at infinity, p>1, is the restriction to symmetric matrices of a 1-quasiconvex function with the same growth. As a consequence, lower semicontinuity results for second-order variational problems are deduced as corollaries of well-known first order theorems. PB - Springer UR - http://hdl.handle.net/1963/2911 U1 - 1789 U2 - Mathematics U3 - Functional Analysis and Applications ER -