Existence and uniqueness of positive solutions of semilinear elliptic equations (Q2461514)

The authors deal with the semi-linear Dirichlet boundary value problem \( Lu=u^{p}\) in \(\Omega \), \(u=0\) on \(\partial \Omega ,\) with a subcrical exponent \(p\) and a uniformly elliptic operator \(L.\) They prove that a positive solution to this problem exists if and only if the first eigenvalue of operator \(L\) is positive. The uniqueness of positive solutions is also considered.