Uniqueness of solutions for an elliptic equation modeling MEMS (Q1021006)

Let \(\Omega\) be an open set in \({\mathbb R}^N\) and let \(f\) be a smooth nonnegative function defined on \(\Omega\). This paper is devoted to the study of solutions \(0<u<1\) of the nonlinear elliptic equation \(-\Delta u=\lambda f(x)/(1-u)^2\) in \(\Omega\), under the Dirichlet boundary condition \(u=0\) on \(\partial\Omega\). The authors are mainly concerned with the role of the real parameter \(\lambda\), in relationship with the geometry of the domain \(\Omega\). There are established several existence and non-existence results and the proofs combine various tools, including the implicit function theorem and the Lyapunov-Schmidt reduction theorem.