Spatial decay results for a class of quasilinear elliptic equations of mode zero (Q807834)

In 1912 S. Bernstein introduced the concept of mode (genre) for quasilinear elliptic equations in two variables. Nitsche (1965) showed that the behavior of such an equation strongly depends on its mode, namely equations with mode less than or equal to one behave very much like linear equations whereas mode greater than one implies different features. In the present paper a class of equations in two independent variables is studied, each of them of mode zero and expressible in divergence form; the minimal surface equation is obtained as a limit case where the mode changes discontinuously from zero to two. The authors show that the solutions of such equations decay exponentially in a semi- infinite strip and specify a lower bound for the decay constant. The results are established under some growth assumptions for the derivatives of the solution, much less restrictive than the ones in previous papers.