The maximum principle for cooperative weakly coupled elliptic systems and some applications (Q1316965)

Some characterizations are obtained of the maximum principle for weakly coupled elliptic cooperative systems. It is shown that a cooperative system behaves as one single equation. This fact is used to analyze the existence and uniqueness of positive principal eigenvalues for some boundary value problems associated with the system. The main goal of the authors is to provide a systematic analysis procedure sharpening most of the results in the references and the establishment of connections and relationships between the different problems treated separately in the literature.