Existence For Shape Optimization Problems in Arbitrary Dimension

We discuss some existence results for optimal design problems governed by second order elliptic equations with the homogeneous Neumann boundary conditions or with the interior transmission conditions. We show that our continuity hypotheses for the unknown boundaries yield the compactness of the associated characteristic functions, which, in turn, guarantees convergence of any minimizing sequences for the first problem. In the second case, weaker assumptions of measurability type are shown to be sufficient for the existence of the optimal material distribution. We impose no restriction on the dimension of the underlying Euclidean space.