Existence of nonnegative solutions for semilinear elliptic equations with subcritical exponents (Q1899888)

Sufficient conditions for existence of positive solutions of the semilinear elliptic boundary value problem \(\Delta u = f(x,u, \nabla u)\) in \(D\), \(u = 0\) on \(\partial D\) are obtained in this paper. Roughly speaking, \(D\) is a smooth bounded domain, and \(f\) has subcritical growth in \(u\) and linear growth in the gradient \(\nabla u\). In particular, they are satisfied for the problem \(- \Delta u = \lambda u + \sum^m_{j = 1} c_ju^{p_j} + b |\nabla u |+ h(x)\) if \(b \geq 0\), \(p_j > 1\), and \(b, \lambda\) and \(|h |_{L^2}\) are small. This generalizes a work by Nkashama and Santanilla. Similar results are also proved in the ordinary differential equation case for both Dirichlet and Neumann boundary conditions. The main tool for the proofs is Schauder's fixed point theorem.