Critical Points of Functionalized Lagrangians

We present a novel class of higher order energies motivated by the study of network formation in binary mixtures of functionalized polymers and solvent. For a broad class of Lagrangians, we introduce their functionalized form, which is a higher order energy balancing the square of the variational derivative against the original energy. We show that the functionalized energies have global minimizers over several natural spaces of admissible functions. The critical points of the functionalized Lagrangian contain those of the original Lagrangian, however we demonstrate that for a sufficient strength of the functionalization all the critical points of the original Lagrangian are saddle points of the functionalized Lagrangian, and the global minima is a new structure.