Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 March 2013
A lower semicontinuity result in BV is obtained for quasiconvexintegrals with subquadratic growth. The key steps in this proof involve obtainingboundedness properties for an extension operator, and a precise blow-up technique thatuses fine properties of Sobolev maps. A similar result is obtained by Kristensen in[Calc. Var. Partial Differ. Equ. 7 (1998) 249–261], wherethere are weaker asssumptions on convergence but the integral needs to satisfy a strongergrowth condition.