Beyond the classical strong maximum principle: sign-changing forcing term and flat solutions (Q6119532)

The paper is concerned with the strong maximum principle for supersolutions \(u\) of linear elliptic equations vanishing on the boundary \(\partial\Omega\) of a smooth bounded domain \(\Omega\) of \(\mathbb{R}^n\): \[ \left\{ \begin{array}{lll} -\Delta u \ge f(x) & \text{in } \Omega,\\ u=0 & \text{on } \partial\Omega. \end{array} \right. \] Supposing \(f\not\equiv 0\), the strong maximum principle says that, if \(f \ge0\) in \(\Omega\), then \(u>0\) in \(\Omega\). The authors are able to prove that, under suitable assumptions, this continues to hold even though \(f\) is sign-changing. Let \(d\mu=\delta(x)dx\), where \(\delta(x)=\mathrm{dist}(x,\partial\Omega)\). Substantially, \(f\) is allowed to be negative only outside a compact \(K\subset \Omega\), where \(f\) is strictly positive, in a way that the weighted norm \(L^1(d\mu)\) of \(f^-\) is suitably small with respect to that one of \(f^+\), and \(f^-\) is required to have a suitable decay near \(\partial\Omega\). As a consequence, the authors show the existence of positive solutions of the homogeneous Dirichlet problem for a semilinear elliptic equation with a sublinear nonlinearity having a sign-changing coefficient. Finally, they deal with the long time behavior of solutions of a Cauchy-Dirichlet problem for the heat equation with sign-changing source and initial condition, proving, under suitable assumptions, their positivity for large values of time.