Regularity of the nodal set of segregated critical configurations under a weak reflection law (Q690645)

The authors of this very interesting paper consider a class of Lipschitz vector functions \(U=(u_1,\ldots ,u_h)\in (H^1(\Omega ))^h\) (\(U\neq 0\)) whose components are nonnegative, disjointly supported, i.e. \(u_i\cdot u_j=0\) (\(i\neq j\)) in \(\Omega \) - open bounded subset of \(\mathbb R^N\) (\(N\geq 2\)). Given an elliptic PDE \[ -\triangle u_i=f_i(x,u_i) \;\;\text{whenever } \;\;u_i>0, \;\;i=1,\ldots ,h , \] where \(f_i:\Omega\times\mathbb R^{+}\to\mathbb R\) are \(C^1\)-functions such that \(f_i(x,s)=O(s)\) as \(s\to 0\), uniformly in \(x\). Here the energy integral has the form \[ \tilde{E}(r)=\frac{1}{r^{N-2}}\int\limits_{B_r(x_0)}|\nabla U|^2, \] where \(x_0\in\Omega \) and \(r\in (0,dist(x_0,\partial\Omega ))\). It turns out that \(\tilde{E}(r)\) is an absolutely continuous function of \(r\). Also assume that it satisfies a special kind of differential equation, which is known as Pohožaev identity. Then the Hausdorff dimension \(\mathcal{H}_{dim}(\Gamma_U)\) of the nodal set \(\Gamma_{U}=\{x\in \Omega : U(x)=0\}\) satisfies \(\mathcal{H}_{dim}(\Gamma_U)\leq N-1\). Under a weak formulation of a reflection law, related to the Pohožaev identity, it is shown that the nodal set is a collection of \(C^{1,\alpha }\) hyper-surfaces, up to a residual set with small Hausdorff dimension. The considered theory is applied to the asymptotic limits of reaction-diffusion systems with strong competition interactions. The optimal partition problems involving eigenvalues are discussed as well.