On the Yamabe problem and the scalar curvature problems under boundary conditions (Q1599502)

The authors prove some existence results for systems of partial differential equations, which are related to problems arising in conformal differential geometry. The geometric problem in its generality consists of finding a conformal metric on the upper half sphere \(S_+^n=\{(x_1,\dots,x_{n+1})\in{\mathbb R}^{n+1} : |x|=1, x_{n+1}>0\}\), such that the scalar curvature of \(S_+^n\) and the mean curvature of \(\partial S_+^n=S^{n-1}\) are prescribed smooth functions. The authors deal with this problem in two special cases, which they call respectively the ``Yamabe like problem'' and the ``Scalar curvature like problem''. They improve recent work done on these two problems by weakening some of the hypotheses in the case where the metrics are close to the standard metric.