Positivity and almost positivity of biharmonic Green's functions under Dirichlet boundary conditions (Q982269)

The authors consider the clamped plate boundary value problem \[ \Delta^2 u= f \quad \text{in }\Omega,\qquad u|_{\partial\Omega}= \frac{\partial}{\partial\nu}u|_{\partial\Omega}=0 \] in a bounded smooth domain \(\Omega\in \mathbb R^n\). In general, for higher order elliptic equations and boundary value problems like above, neither a maximum principle nor a comparison principle or -- equivalently -- a positivity preserving property is available. The problem is rather involved since the clamped boundary conditions prevent the boundary value problem from being reasonably written as a system of second order boundary value problems. It is shown that, on the other hand, for bounded smooth domains \(\Omega \), the negative part of the corresponding Green's function is ``small'' when compared with its singular positive part, provided \({n\geqq 3}\). Moreover, the biharmonic Green's function in balls \(B\subset\mathbb R^n\) under Dirichlet (that is, clamped) boundary conditions is known explicitly and is positive. It has been known for some time that positivity is preserved under small regular perturbations of the domain, if \(n = 2\). In the present paper, such a stability result is proved for \({n\geqq 3}\).