Existence theorems for certain elliptic and parabolic semilinear equations (Q1363607)

The author establishes a general existence result for the nonlinear parabolic equation \[ -\partial u/\partial t+\Delta u+|u|^p+f(x,t)=0\text{ in }\mathbb{R}^n\times[0,+\infty) \] with zero initial value and under explicit conditions on the locally Hölder continuous nonhomogeneous term \(f(x,t)\). The proof uses the Schauder-Tichonov theorem applied to the corresponding parabolic volume potential, after observing that this potential is equicontinuous on convex bounded sets of \(\mathbb{R}^n\times[0,+\infty)\). A remarkable consequence is that the solution of this problem converges as \(t\to\infty\) to a solution of the attached elliptic equation in the whole of \(\mathbb{R}^n\). Independently, an existence result for this elliptic equation is proven in the paper. The hypotheses on the nonhomogeneous term \(f(x)\) are quite generous: it is not necessarily positive but has a slower decay at infinity. The proof follows by applying the same fixed point theorem, as well as a monotone property of the solutions to all elliptic equations of this structure. The paper ends by concluding that similar existence results can be deduced for more general classes of elliptic and parabolic equations.