Proportionality of components, Liouville theorems and a priori estimates for noncooperative elliptic systems (Q2453513)

This paper is concerned with the existence, nonexistence and qualitative properties of classical solutions of a nonlinear elliptic system in the form \[ \left\{ { -\Delta u = f(x,u,v),}\atop{ -\Delta v = g(x,u,v).}\right. \eqno(1.1) \] The authors investigate noncooperative, possibly nonvariational, systems with nonlinearities which have power growth in \(u,v\) and in which the reaction terms dominate the absorption term. They are interested in the nonexistence or more general in classification results in unbounded domains, as well as in their applications to a priori estimates and the existence of positive solutions of Dirichlet problems in bounded domains. We can describe their results by applying them to the system \[ \begin{cases} -\Delta u = uv^p[a(x)v^q-c(x)u^q]+\mu(x)u\quad & \text{in} \; \Omega, \\ -\Delta v = vu^p[b(x)u^q-d(x)v^q]+\nu(x)v\quad & \text{in} \; \Omega, \\ \quad u =0, v=0, & \text{on} \; \partial\Omega \; (\text{if}\; \partial\Omega\not=\emptyset), \end{cases}\eqno(1.2) \] where \(\Omega\subseteq \mathbb R^n\), \[ p\geq0, \quad q\geq 0, \quad q\geq|1-p|, \eqno(1.3) \] and the coefficients \(a,b, c,d,\mu,\nu\) are Hölder continuous functions in \(\overline{\Omega}\), with \[ a,b>0\quad \text{in} \; \overline{\Omega},\quad c,d\geq0\quad \text{in} \; \overline{\Omega}.\eqno(1.4) \] We denote \(D:= ab- cd\) and \(\lambda_1\) the first eigenvalue of \(-\Delta\) with Dirichlet boundary conditions in \(\Omega\). The following two theorems illustrate the more general results obtained in this article. Theorem 1.1: Let \(\Omega\) be a smooth bounded domain. Assume that (1.3), (1.4) hold, \[ \qquad \inf\limits_{\Omega} D>0,\quad p+q< \frac{4}{(n-2)_+} \] and \[ \mu,\nu< \lambda_1 \quad \text{in}\; \overline{\Omega}. \] Then system (1.2) has a classical solution \((u,v)\) in \(\Omega\), such that \(u,v>0\) in \(\Omega\). All such solutions are uniformly bounded in \(L^\infty(\Omega)\). Theorem 1.2: Assume that (1.3), (1.4) hold, \(\mu=\nu=0\), and \(a, b, c, d\) are constants. Let \((u,v)\) be a nonnegative classical solution of (1.2). 1. If \(\Omega=\mathbb R^n\) and \(D\geq 0\) then either \(u\equiv 0\), or \(v\equiv 0\), or \(u\equiv Kv\) for some unique constant \(K>0\). 2. If \(\Omega= \mathbb R^n\), \(D> 0\) and \(p+q< \frac{4}{(n-2)_+}\), then for some nonegative constant \(C\geq 0\) \[ (u,v)\equiv (C,0) \quad \text{or} \quad(u,v)\equiv (0,C). \] If \(p=0\) then \(C=0\). 3. If \(\Omega\) is half space of \(\mathbb R^n\) and \(u,v\in L^\infty(\Omega)\), then \(u=v\equiv 0\). The authors use a new methods to obtain classification (or non-existence) results for solution of (1.1) in \(\mathbb R^n\) or in half space of \(R^n\). Uniform a priori estimates and the existence of positive solutions of Dirichlet problems in bounded domains are obtained via the rescaling (or blow-up) method of Gidas and Spruck combined with topological degree arguments.