English

On a class of elliptic free boundary problems with multiple solutions

Analysis of PDEs 2020-03-13 v1

Abstract

We prove that a certain class of elliptic free boundary problems, which includes the Prandtl-Batchelor problem from fluid dynamics as a special case, has two distinct nontrivial solutions for large values of a parameter. The first solution is a global minimizer of the energy. The energy functional is nondifferentiable, so standard variational arguments cannot be used directly to obtain a second nontrivial solution. We obtain our second solution as the limit of mountain pass points of a sequence of C1C^1-functionals approximating the energy. We use careful estimates of the corresponding energy levels to show that this limit is neither trivial nor a minimizer.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2003.05921,
  title  = {On a class of elliptic free boundary problems with multiple solutions},
  author = {Kanishka Perera},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2003.05921},
  year   = {2020}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-23T14:13:07.782Z