Some estimates and maximum principles for weakly coupled systems of elliptic PDE (Q1017739)

The author deals with maximum principles and Harnak type estimates for the following system of linear elliptic PDEs of second order \[ \left\{ \begin{matrix} L_1u_1+c_{11}\left( x\right) u_1+c_{12}\left( x\right) u_2+...+c_{1n}\left( x\right) u_n=f_1\left( x\right) \\ L_2u_2+c_{21}\left( x\right) u_1+c_{22}\left( x\right) u_2+...+c_{2n}\left( x\right) u_n=f_2\left( x\right) \\ ........................................ \\ L_nu_n+c_{n1}\left( x\right) u_1+c_{n2}\left( x\right) u_2+...+c_{nn}\left( x\right) u_n=f_n\left( x\right) \end{matrix} \right. \] in \(\Omega \subset \mathbb{R}^N\), bounded domain, \(n,N\geq 1\). Here \( L_1,\dots,L_n\) are supposed to be uniformly elliptic operators in general non-divergence form \[ L_{k=}\sum\limits_{i,j=1}^Na_{ij}^k\left( x\right) \frac{\partial ^2}{ \partial x_i\partial x_j}+\sum\limits_{i=1}^Nb_i^k\left( x\right) \frac{ \partial u}{\partial x_i} \] with \(\lambda \left\| \xi \right\| ^2\leq \sum\limits_{i,j=1}^Na_{ij}\xi _i\xi _j\leq \Lambda \left\| \xi \right\| ^2,\xi \in \mathbb{R}^N\), for some \(0<\lambda \leq \Lambda \). The starting point of this paper was another paper of the author and J. Busca where an Alexandrov-Bakelman-Pucci (ABP) inequality and a Harnak inequality for cooperative systems were proved. There the prove was based on the difficult theory of \(L^N\)-viscosity solution of fully nonlinear PDE. The purpose of this paper is to give some elementary and shorter proofs of the above mentioned results in the linear case, which use only the standard theory of scalar linear PDE, as developed by D. Gilbarg and N.S. Trudinger. Furthermore the proofs permit to improve the results by allowing the system to have unbounded coefficients with (optimal) Lebesgue integrability. The author also discuss some explicit conditions for a system to satisfy the maximum principle.