A note on radial symmetry of positive solutions for semilinear elliptic equations in \(\mathbb R^n\). (Q1854048)

The author deals with the symmetry properties of positive solutions for the equation of the form \[ \Delta u+\phi (| x| )f(u)=0 \leqno (1) \] in \(\mathbb R^n\), where \(n\geq 3\), \(\Delta \) is the \(n\)-dimensional Laplacian, and \(| x| \) denotes the Euclidean length of \(x\in \mathbb R^n\); \(\phi \not \equiv 0\) is a locally Hölder continuous function on \([0,\infty )\), \(\phi (r) \geq 0 \text{ for } r\geq 0\) and \(\phi (r)\) is nonincreasing in \(r>0\), \(f\in C^1([0,\infty )),f(u)>0 \) for \(u>0\). The main result is the following Theorem. Assume \(\int _0^\infty r\phi (r)dr < \infty \). Then all bounded positive solutions of (1) in \(\mathbb R^n\) are radially symmetric about the origin.