Nondegeneracy and uniqueness for boundary blow-up elliptic problems

In this paper, we use for the first time linearization techniques to deal with boundary blow-up elliptic problems. After introducing a convenient functional setting, we show that the problem Δu=λa(x)u^p+g(x,u) in Ω, with u=+∞ on ∂Ω, has a unique positive solution for large enough λ, and determine its asymptotic behavior as λ→+∞. Here p>1, a(x) is a continuous function which can be singular near ∂Ω and g(x,u) is a perturbation term with potential growth near zero and infinity. We also consider more general problems, obtained by replacing u^p by e^u or a “logistic type” function f(u).