A singular perturbation problem of Carrier and Pearson (Q5934260)

Here, the author presents many references in which the Carrier-Pearson problem has been discussed. It is shown that the assumption of symmetric location of the spikes for singularly perturbed nonlinear elliptic problems corresponding to second-order ODEs with homogeneous Dirichlet conditions allows the construction of uniform approximate solutions to all exponentially small orders. To do this construction is essential the assumption of symmetric location mentioned above, but the analysis does not establish the nonexistence of solutions with spikes located elsewhere. One of the hypotheses on the nonlinear term in the equation is an already known necessary condition for the existence of a solution with a spike extending from near one end of the interval to the other. An approximation to the solution to the problem near the boundary layers is constructed via appropriate expansions. The author proves that formal approximations of sufficiently high order are close to an actual solution to the former BVP. To do so, the author first introduces the inner variable and studies the Green function corresponding to the equation resulting from the linearization of the first term in the asymptotic of the former one near the obtained above approximate solution adding appropriate boundary conditions. Then, the author constructs approximate solutions with sufficiently small exponential errors, gives careful estimations using Gronwall inequalities and Taylor expansions and justifies the approximations with contraction mapping arguments. At the ending section, one can find three related examples.