Bifurcation theory for semilinear elliptic boundary value problems

Bifurcations in context of PDEs (35B32) Nonlinear boundary value problems for linear elliptic equations (35J65) Degenerate elliptic equations (35J70) Estimates of eigenvalues in context of PDEs (35P15) Nonlinear eigenvalue problems and nonlinear spectral theory for PDEs (35P30)

Review text

The paper is devoted to static bifurcation theory for a class of semilinear elliptic degenerate boundary value problem: \[ \begin{cases}-\text{div}(A(x)\nabla u)+c(x)u=f(\lambda ,x,u) & \text{in }D \\ Bu:=a\frac{\partial u}{\partial v}+bu=\varphi & \text{on }\partial D. \end{cases} \] Here \(D\) is a bounded domain in \(\mathbb{R}^{N}\) with smooth boundary \(\partial D,\) \(u\in C^{2+\theta }(D)\) for some \(\theta \in (0,1)\), \(\lambda \) is a real parameter, \(c(x)>0\) in \(D,\) and \(A(x)\) is a symmetric matrix with real smooth coefficients for which there exists a constant \(a_{0}>0\) such that \((A(x)\xi ,\xi)\geq a_{0}|\xi |^{2},\) \(x\in \overline{D},\) \(\xi \in \mathbb{R}^{N}.\) The word degenerate means that the smooth boundary functions \(a\) and \(b\) satisfy: \(a\geq 0\) on \(\partial D\), \(b\geq 0\) on \(\partial D\), and \(b>0\) on \(M=\{\sigma \in \partial D\): \(a(\sigma)=0\}.\) At first, it is shown that the first eigenvalue of the operator \({\mathcal A}u=-\text{div}(A(x)\nabla u)+c(x)u,\) \(u\in {\mathcal D(A)}=\{u\in W^{2,2}(D):Bu=0\}\) is simple with positive eigenfunction. The given spectral analysis of the operator \({\mathcal A}\) is the background for the proof of the local static bifurcation theorem for (1), where \(f(\lambda ,x,u)\equiv \lambda u-G(\lambda ,u)\) (for the nondegenerate case see \textit{H. Amann} [SIAM Rev. 18, 620-709 (1976; Zbl 0345.47044)]). In the sequel, under the so-called slope condition on the nonlinear term \(f(\lambda ,x,u)\equiv f(x,u)\), necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of positive solutions to (1) are derived, by means of the super-subsolution method (for the nondegenerate case see \textit{H. Brezis} and \textit{L. Oswald} [Nonlinear Anal., Theory Methods Appl. 10, 55-64 (1986; Zbl 0593.35045)]). As consequence of the preceding results, the global bifurcation theory is studied in the following both cases: \(f(\lambda ,x,u)\equiv \lambda u-h(u)\) and \(f(\lambda ,x,u)\equiv \lambda g(u).\) Finally, six examples and figures are given illustrating the bifurcation point for (1) with respect to different nonlinearities \(f(\lambda ,x,u).\)

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