Critical points of the regular part of the harmonic Green function with Robin boundary condition (Q957964)

The authors consider the Green function for the Laplacian in a smooth bounded domain \(\Omega \subset \mathbb R^N\) with Robin boundary condition \[ \frac{\partial G_{\lambda}}{\partial \nu}+\lambda b(x)G_{\lambda}=0 \quad \text{on } \partial \Omega, \] and its regular part \(S_{\lambda }(x,y)\), where \(b>0\) is smooth. They show first that the Robin function \(R_{\lambda }(x)=S_{\lambda }(x,x)\) has at least 3 critical points for \(\lambda\) large enough. Then, for \(b\equiv \) const, they prove that \(R_{\lambda }\) has critical points near non-degenerate critical points of the mean curvature of the boundary and they obtain a precise asymptotic formula for \(R_\lambda\). Moreover, they prove also that there are critical points of \(R_{\lambda }\) near non-degenerate critical points of \(b\) if \(b\not \equiv \) const.