The moving plane method for singular semilinear elliptic problems

Laplace operator, Helmholtz equation (reduced wave equation), Poisson equation (35J05) Boundary value problems for second-order elliptic equations (35J25) Semilinear elliptic equations (35J61) Singular elliptic equations (35J75)

Abstract: We consider positive solutions to semilinear elliptic problems with singular nonlinearities, under zero Dirichlet boundary condition. We exploit a refined version of the moving plane method to prove symmetry and monotonicity properties of the solutions, under general assumptions on the nonlinearity.

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The following Dirichlet problem is considered \[ \begin{aligned} & - \Delta u = u^{-\nu} + f(x,u), \;quad u>0, \quad x \in \Omega, \\ & u=0, \quad x \in \partial \Omega, \end{aligned}\tag{1} \] where \(\nu>0\), \(u \in C^2(\Omega) \cap C(\bar{\Omega})\) and \(\Omega \subset \mathbb{R}^n\) is a bounded and smooth domain. The main goal of the paper is to study the symmetry and monotonicity properties of the positive solutions of (1) under the following general assumptions on the nonlinearity: \(f(x,t)\) is a Caratheodory function which is uniformly locally Lipschitz continuous with respect to the second variable, and \(f(\cdot,t)\) is non decreasing in the \(x \cdot v\)-direction, \(v \in S^{n+1}\) in the set \(\Omega_0^v = \Omega \cap \{ x \in \mathbb{R}^n | x \cdot v <0 \}\) for \(t \in [0,\infty)\). If in addition \(\Omega\) is convex w.r.t. the \(v\)-direction and symmetric w.r.t. \(T_0^v = \{ x \in \mathbb{R}^n | x \cdot v=0 \}\), then the main result is that every positive solution \(u \in C^2(\Omega) \cap C(\bar{\Omega})\) is symmetric w.r.t. \(T_0^v\) and non-decreasing w.r.t. the \(v\)-direction in \(\Omega_0^v\). In particular, if \(\Omega\) is a ball centered at the origin of radius \(R > 0\), then \(u\) is radially symmetric with \(\frac{\partial u}{\partial r} (r) <0\), \(0<r<R\).

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