A limit equation and bifurcation diagrams of semilinear elliptic equations with general supercritical growth

We study radial solutions of the semilinear elliptic equation

$\mathrm{\Delta }u+f(u)=0$

under rather general growth conditions on f. We construct a radial singular solution and study the intersection number between the singular solution and a regular solution. An application to bifurcation problems of elliptic Dirichlet problems is given. To this end, we derive a certain limit equation from the original equation at infinity, using a generalized similarity transformation. Through a generalized Cole–Hopf transformation, all the limit equations can be reduced into two typical cases, i.e., $\mathrm{\Delta }u+u^p=0$ and $\mathrm{\Delta }u+e^u=0$.