Nonexistence of solutions for elliptic equations with supercritical nonlinearity in nearly nontrivial domains (Q2180288)

Summary: We deal with nonlinear elliptic Dirichlet problems of the form \[\text{div}(|D u|^{p-2}D u)+f(u)=0\quad\mbox{ in }\Omega,\qquad u=0 \mbox{ on }\partial\Omega\] where \(\Omega\) is a bounded domain in \(\mathbb{R}^n\), \(n\ge 2\), \(p > 1\) and \(f\) has supercritical growth from the viewpoint of Sobolev embedding. Our aim is to show that there exist bounded contractible non star-shaped domains \(\Omega \), arbitrarily close to domains with nontrivial topology, such that the problem does not have nontrivial solutions. For example, we prove that if \(n=2\), \(1 < p < 2\), \(f(u)=|u|^{q-2}u\) with \(q > \frac{2p}{2-p}\) and \(\Omega=\{(\rho\cos\theta,\rho\sin\theta) :\|\theta|<\alpha, |\rho -1| < s\}\) with \(0 < \alpha < \pi\) and \(0 < s < 1\), then for all \(q > \frac{2p}{2-p}\) there exists \(\bar s > 0\) such that the problem has only the trivial solution \(u\equiv 0\) for all \(\alpha\in (0,\pi)\) and \(s\in (0,\bar s)\).