Monotonicity formulae and classification results for singular, degenerate, anisotropic PDEs (Q261179)

The authors of this article consider singular elliptic equations that are possibly degenerate in a possibly anisotropic medium. Results concerning monotonicity of the energy density, rigidity for the solutions, and classifications for the singularity/degeneracy/anisotropy are presented. The equations considered are of elliptic type (singularity or degeneracy allowed) and the forcing term only depends on the values of the solution and the elliptic operator is constant along the level sets of the solution. The authors' purpose of this work is to understand the properties of the solution which has strong geometric restrictions. In the first section, the authors present a monotonicity formula for a suitably rescaled version of the Wulff type energy functional for a Euler-Lagrange equation where the anisotropic term is encoded into a homogeneous function \(H\) which they call ``the anisotropy''. They also elaborate on the geometric conditions that the anisotropy \(H\) has to satisfy. This section contains a Liouville-type of rigidity result as well as some equivalent characterizations of the conditions and assumptions for the previously stated results. Section \(2\) contains a collection of basic properties for the anisotropy and some comments on the regularity of the solution. Proof of equivalence of two sets of conditions is given in Section \(3\). In Section \(4\), the authors present the proof of the main result on monotonicity. To circumvent the lack of regularity of the solution, a sequence of approximating problems are introduced and their solutions are computed. The result for the solution of the original problem is recovered through passing to the limit in the approximating problems. The proof of the Liouville-type theorem is given in Section \(5\) as a corollary to the theorem with the monotonicity formula. The final two sections deal with characterizations of the conditions on the anisotropy including the proof of a technical proposition presented earlier.