Principal eigenvalues and the Dirichlet problem for fully nonlinear elliptic operators (Q2482054)

The authors study uniformly elliptic fully nonlinear equations in nondivergence form \[ F(D^2u,Du,u,x)=f(x) \] in a bounded domain \(\Omega\subset \mathbb{R}^n\). The first aim of this investigation is to show that positive homogeneous operators \(F\) which are convex (concave)-like Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman operators, i.e. suprema of linear operators with nonsmooth coefficients possess two principal eigenvalues, corresponding to a positive and a negative principal eigenfunction and to study their properties. The second aim is to show that the existence and uniqueness theory can be developed for coercive nonproper operators whose both principal eigenvalues (sometimes only one of them) are positive. Existence results are obtained for the Dirichlet problem for nonproper non-convex operators under the hypothesis that some related operator is coercive.