English

Nonnegative solutions with a nontrivial nodal set for elliptic equations on smooth symmetric domains

Analysis of PDEs 2012-05-08 v1

Abstract

We consider a semilinear elliptic equation on a smooth bounded domain \Om\Om in R2\R^2, assuming that both the domain and the equation are invariant under reflections about one of the coordinate axes, say the y-axis. It is known that nonnegative solutions of the Dirichlet problem for such equations are symmetric about the axis, and, if strictly positive, they are also decreasing in xx for x>0x>0. Our goal is to exhibit examples of equations which admit nonnegative, nonzero solutions for which the second property fails; necessarily, such solutions have a nontrivial nodal set in \Om\Om. Previously, such examples were known for nonsmooth domains only.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1205.1213,
  title  = {Nonnegative solutions with a nontrivial nodal set for elliptic equations on smooth symmetric domains},
  author = {Peter Polacik and Susanna Terracini},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1205.1213},
  year   = {2012}
}

Comments

15 pages, 4 figures