The moving plane method for singular semilinear elliptic problems (Q2396836)

The following Dirichlet problem is considered \[ \begin{aligned} & - \Delta u = u^{-\nu} + f(x,u), \;quad u>0, \quad x \in \Omega, \\ & u=0, \quad x \in \partial \Omega, \end{aligned}\tag{1} \] where \(\nu>0\), \(u \in C^2(\Omega) \cap C(\bar{\Omega})\) and \(\Omega \subset \mathbb{R}^n\) is a bounded and smooth domain. The main goal of the paper is to study the symmetry and monotonicity properties of the positive solutions of (1) under the following general assumptions on the nonlinearity: \(f(x,t)\) is a Caratheodory function which is uniformly locally Lipschitz continuous with respect to the second variable, and \(f(\cdot,t)\) is non decreasing in the \(x \cdot v\)-direction, \(v \in S^{n+1}\) in the set \(\Omega_0^v = \Omega \cap \{ x \in \mathbb{R}^n | x \cdot v <0 \}\) for \(t \in [0,\infty)\). If in addition \(\Omega\) is convex w.r.t. the \(v\)-direction and symmetric w.r.t. \(T_0^v = \{ x \in \mathbb{R}^n | x \cdot v=0 \}\), then the main result is that every positive solution \(u \in C^2(\Omega) \cap C(\bar{\Omega})\) is symmetric w.r.t. \(T_0^v\) and non-decreasing w.r.t. the \(v\)-direction in \(\Omega_0^v\). In particular, if \(\Omega\) is a ball centered at the origin of radius \(R > 0\), then \(u\) is radially symmetric with \(\frac{\partial u}{\partial r} (r) <0\), \(0<r<R\).