Globally Lipschitz minimizers for variational problems with linear growth

We study the minimization of convex, variational integrals of linear growth among all functions in the Sobolev space W 1,1 with prescribed boundary values (or its equivalent formulation as a boundary value problem for a degenerately elliptic Euler–Lagrange equation). Due to insufficient compactness properties of these Dirichlet classes, the existence of solutions does not follow in a standard way by the direct method in the calculus of variations and in fact might fail, as it is well-known already for the non-parametric minimal surface problem. Assuming radial structure, we establish a necessary and sufficient condition on the integrand such that the Dirichlet problem is in general solvable, in the sense that a Lipschitz solution exists for any regular domain and all prescribed regular boundary values, via the construction of appropriate barrier functions in the tradition of Serrin’s paper [J. Serrin, Philos. Trans. R. Soc. Lond., Ser. A 264 (1969) 413–496].