From energy bounds to dimensional estimates in a branched transport model for type-I superconductors

We consider a branched transport type problem which describes the magnetic flux through type-I superconductors in a regime of very weak applied fields. At the boundary of the sample, deviation of the magnetization from being uniform is penalized through a negative Sobolev norm. It was conjectured by S. Conti, F. Otto and S. Serfaty that as a result, the trace of the magnetization on the boundary should be a measure of Hausdorff dimension $8/5$. We prove that this conjecture is equivalent to the proof of local energy bounds with an optimal exponent. We then obtain local bounds which are however not optimal. These yield improved lower bounds on the dimension of the irrigated measure but unfortunately does not improve on the trivial upper bound. In order to illustrate the dependence of this dimension on the choice of penalization, we consider in the last part of the paper a toy model where the boundary energy is given by a Wasserstein distance to Lebesgue. In this case minimizers are finite graphs and thus the trace is atomic.