On a fractional Nirenberg problem. I: Blow up analysis and compactness of solutions (Q2510742)

The authors prove existence and compactness results for solutions of a fractional Nirenberg problem. Let \((\mathbb{S}^{n},g_{0})\), \( n\geq 2\), be the standard sphere and \(K\) be a positive function on the sphere. The Nirenberg problem is to find a function \(w\) on \(\mathbb{S} ^{n}\) such that the scalar curvature \(R_{g}\) of the conformal metric \( g=e^{w}g_{0}\) is equal to \(K\) on \(\mathbb{S}^{n}\). This problem may be written as \(-\Delta _{g_{0}}w+1=Ke^{2w}\) in \(\mathbb{S} ^{2}\) or \(-\Delta _{g_{0}}v+c(n)R_{0}v=c(n)Kv^{\frac{n+2}{n-2}} \) in \(\mathbb{S}^{n}\) \(n\geq 3\), where \(\Delta _{g_{0}}\) is the Laplace-Beltrami operator, \(c(n)=\frac{n-2}{4(n-1)}\), \(R_{0}=n(n-1)\) and \(v=e^{\frac{n-2}{4}w}\). The authors introduce the intertwining operator \( P_{\sigma }=\frac{\Gamma (B+1/2+\sigma )}{\Gamma (B+1/2-\sigma )}\) where \(B= \sqrt{-\Delta _{g_{0}}+\left( \frac{n-1}{2}\right) ^{2}}\) and \( \Gamma \) is the Gamma function, and they consider the problem \(P_{\sigma }(v)=P_{\sigma }(1)Kv^{\frac{n+2\sigma }{n-2\sigma }}\) on \(\mathbb{S}^{n}\), where \(K\) is a continuous and positive function on \(\mathbb{S}^{n}\). They assume \(\sigma \in (0,1)\) and \(n\geq 2\). The first main result of the paper is that this problem has at least one positive solution in \(C^{2}\) assuming smoothness, symmetry and flatness properties of \(K\). They then specialize this existence result to a special case which will be proved in a forthcoming paper. The third main result gives uniform bounds in \(L^{2n/(n-2\sigma )}(\mathbb{S}^{n})\) for solutions of this problem under some further hypothesis on \(K\) and its gradient. The authors then consider a sequence \(\{K_{i}\}\) of functions in \(C^{1,1}(\mathbb{S}^{n})\) with uniform \(C^{1,1}\) norm and satisfying \(1/A_{1}\leq K_{i}\leq A_{1}\) on \( \mathbb{S}^{n}\) for some positive \(A_{1}\) and some further assumption. The authors prove that every sequence \(\{v_{i}\}\) of corresponding positive solutions either is bounded in \(L^{\infty }(\mathbb{S}^{n})\) or blows up at exactly one point. The proof of these results uses a detailed analysis of the blow up properties of the solutions of the above problem involving \( P_{\sigma }\) and a Liouville type theorem. The authors then prove that this problem may be connected to the degenerate elliptic equation \(\mathrm{div}(t^{1-2\sigma }\nabla U(x,t))=0\) in \(\mathbb{R}_{+}^{n+1}\) with the boundary condition \(-\lim_{t\rightarrow 0}t^{1-2\sigma }\partial _{t}U(x,t)=K(x)U(x,0)^{\frac{n+2\sigma }{n-2\sigma }}\) in \(\partial \mathbb{R }_{+}^{n+1}\), using a localization method for the fractional Laplace operator \((-\Delta )^{\sigma }\) on \(\mathbb{R}^{n}\). The last main result proves some properties of the solution \(U\in H_{\mathrm{loc}}(t^{1-2\sigma }, \overline{\mathbb{R}_{+}^{n+1}})\) of this problem with \(K=1\). For all these results, the authors extend to the case \(\sigma \in (0,1)\) and \(n\geq 2 \) results obtained earlier by different authors for \(\sigma =1\).