Intervals of bifurcation points for semilinear elliptic problems

In this paper, we study the behavior of multiple continua of solutions to the semilinear elliptic problem \begin{equation*} \begin{cases} -\Delta u = \lambda f(u) &\text{ in } \Omega, u=0 &\text{ on } \partial\Omega, \end{cases} \end{equation*} where $\Omega$ is a bounded open subset of $\re^N$ and $f$ is a nonnegative continuous real function with multiple zeros. We analyze both the behavior of unbounded continua of solutions having norm between consecutive zeros of $f$, and the asymptotic behavior of the multiple unbounded continua in the case in which $f$ has a countable infinite set of positive zeros. In both cases, we pay special attention to the multiplicity results they give rise to. For the model cases $f(t) = t^r(1+\sin t)$ and $f(t) = t^r \left(1+\sin \frac{1}{t}\right)$ with $r\geq 0$ we show the surprising fact that there are some values of $r$ for which every $\lambda>0$ is a bifurcation point (either from infinity or from zero) that is not a branching point.