The boundary growth of superharmonic functions and positive solutions of nonlinear elliptic equations (Q2465223)

The first part of the paper is concerned with the boundary growth of superharmonic functions. More precisely, the author establishes the following interesting result. Theorem 1. Let \(\Omega\subset\mathbb R^n\), \(n\geq 3\), be a bounded domain, \(\alpha\geq 0\) and \(p>0\). Consider a positive superharmonic function \(u\) in \(\Omega\) such that its Riesz function \(f_u\) satisfies \(0\leq f_u\leq c \text{ dist}(x,\partial \Omega)^{-\alpha} u^p\) in \(\Omega\). Then \(u\leq A \text{ dist}(x,\partial\Omega)^{1-n}\) in \(\Omega\) if and only if \(p<(n+1)/(n-1)\) and \(\alpha\leq n+1-p(n-1)\). The second part of the paper is concerned with the existence of positive solutions for \(-\Delta u+Vu=f(x,u)\) in \(\Omega\), where \(f,V\) are two Borel functions belonging to a certain Kato class. In particular the following result is obtained. Theorem 2. Let \(\xi\in\Omega\), \(c>0\), \(0<p<(n+1)/(n-1)\), and \(0\leq \alpha\leq \min\{n+1-p(n-1),p+1\}\). If \(g\) is a locally Hölder continuous function on \(\Omega\) such that \(| g(x)| \leq c\text{ dist}(x,\partial\Omega)^{-\alpha}\) in \(\Omega\), then the equation \(-\Delta u=g(x) u^p\) in \(\Omega\) has infinitely many solutions \(u\in C^2(\Omega)\) such that \[ c_1\frac{\text{dist}(x,\partial\Omega)}{| x-\xi| ^n}\leq u(x)\leq c_2\frac{\text{dist}(x,\partial\Omega)}{| x-\xi| ^n}\quad\forall x\in\Omega, \] where \(c_1,c_2>0\).