Energy estimate up to the boundary for stable solutions to semilinear elliptic problems (Q6065739)

The author obtains a universal energy estimate up to the boundary for stable solutions of semilinear equations with variable coefficients. More precisely he considers classical solutions \(u\in C^2(\overline{\Omega})\) to \(-L(u)=f(u)\) in a bounded domain \(\Omega\subset{\mathbb R}^n\), where \(L\) denotes a uniformly elliptic operator of the form \[ L=a_{ij}(x)\partial_{ij}+b_i(x)\partial_i\, , \quad a_{ij}(x)=a_{ji}(x). \] A solution \(u\) of the previous equation is called stable if the principal eigenvalue (with respect to Dirichlet conditions) of the linearized equation \(-L-f'(u)\) is nonnegative. His main result is an estimate for the norm of the gradient of stable solutions vanishing on the flat part of a half-ball, for any nonnegative and nondecreasing \(f\). That is, a bound of the type \[ \Vert\nabla u\Vert_{L^{2+\gamma}(B^+_{1/2})}\leq C\Vert u\Vert_{L^1 (B^+_1)}, \] where \(\gamma=\gamma (n)>0\), \(C=C(n,a_{ij},b_i)\) and \(B^+_\rho\) denotes the half-ball of radius \(\rho\). This bound only requires the elliptic coefficients to be Lipschitz. As a consequence, his estimate continues to hold in general \(C^{1,1}\) domains if we further assume the nonlinearity \(f\) to be convex. This result is new even for the Laplace operator, for which a \(C^3\) regularity assumption on the domain was needed. A fundamental ingredient in the proof of the previous estimate will be to control the Hessian of a stable solution in half-balls. To this purpose, the author obtains boundary Hessian estimates which can be interpreted as a generalization of a geometric stability condition due to Sternberg and Zumbrun.