Energy stability for a class of semilinear elliptic problems

In this paper, we consider semilinear elliptic problems in a bounded domain $\Omega$ contained in a given unbounded Lipschitz domain $\mathcal C \subset \mathbb R^N$. Our aim is to study how the energy of a solution behaves with respect to volume-preserving variations of the domain $\Omega$ inside $\mathcal C$. Once a rigorous variational approach to this question is set, we focus on the cases when $\mathcal C$ is a cone or a cylinder and we consider spherical sectors and radial solutions or bounded cylinders and special one-dimensional solutions, respectively. In these cases, we show both stability and instability results, which have connections with related overdetermined problems.