On De Giorgi's conjecture of nonlocal approximations for free-discontinuity problems: The symmetric gradient case

We prove that E. De Giorgi's conjecture for the nonlocal approximation of free-discontinuity problems extends to the case of functionals defined in terms of the symmetric gradient of the admissible field. After introducing a suitable class of continuous finite-difference approximants, we show the compactness of deformations with equibounded energies, as well as their Gamma-convergence. The compactness analysis is a crucial hurdle, which we overcome by generalizing a Fréchet-Kolmogorov approach previously introduced by two of the authors. A second essential difficulty is the identification of the limiting space of admissible deformations, since a control on the directional variations is, a priori, only available in average. A limiting representation in GSBD is eventually established via a novel characterization of this space.