Alexandroff-Bakelman-Pucci estimate and Harnack inequality for degenerate/singular fully non-linear elliptic equations

In this paper, we study fully non-linear elliptic equations in non-divergence form which can be degenerate or singular when “the gradient is small”. Typical examples are either equations involving the m-Laplace operator or Bellman-Isaacs equations from stochastic control problems. We establish an Alexandroff-Bakelman-Pucci estimate and we prove a Harnack inequality for viscosity solutions of such non-linear elliptic equations.     

Large time behavior and L−L estimate of solutions of 2-dimensional nonlinear damped wave equations

We show the asymptotic behavior of the solution to the Cauchy problem of the two-dimensional damped wave equation. It is shown that the solution of the linear damped wave equation asymptotically decompose into a solution of the heat and wave equations and the difference of those solutions satisfies the L^p−L^q type estimate. This is a two-dimensional generalization of the three-dimensional result due to Nishihara (Math. Z. 244 (2003) 631). To show this, we use the Fourier transform and observe that the evolution operators of the damped wave equation can be approximated by the solutions of the heat and wave equations. By using the L^p−L^q estimate, we also discuss the asymptotic behavior of the semilinear problem of the damped wave equation with the power nonlinearity |u|^αu. Our result covers the whole super critical case α>1, where the α=1 is well known as the Fujita exponent when n=2.     

SMOOTHING EFFECTS OF DISPERSIVE PSEUDODIFFERENTIAL EQUATIONS

ABSTRACT

We discuss smoothing effects of dispersive-type pseudodifferential equations whose principal part is not necessarily elliptic. For equations with constant coefficients, a restriction theorem and a smoothing estimate of the resolvent of the principal part obtain smoothing estimates of solutions in weighted Lebesgue spaces. Moreover, we discuss well-posedness of the initial value problem and an alternative approach to the smoothing effects of general dispersive equations with variable coefficients via pseudodifferential calculus. Our results are the natural generalization of smoothing effects of Schrödinger-type equations.     

Gradient regularity for elliptic equations in the Heisenberg group

We give dimension-free regularity conditions for a class of possibly degenerate sub-elliptic equations in the Heisenberg group exhibiting super-quadratic growth in the horizontal gradient; this solves an issue raised in [J.J. Manfredi, G. Mingione, Regularity results for quasilinear elliptic equations in the Heisenberg group, Math. Ann. 339 (2007) 485-544], where only dimension dependent bounds for the growth exponent are given. We also obtain explicit a priori local regularity estimates, and cover the case of the horizontal p-Laplacean operator, extending some regularity proven in [A. Domokos, J.J. Manfredi, C1,α-regularity for p-harmonic functions in the Heisenberg group for p near 2, in: Contemp. Math., vol. 370, 2005, pp. 17-23]. In turn, using some recent techniques of Caffarelli and Peral [L. Caffarelli, I. Peral, On W1,p estimates for elliptic equations in divergence form, Comm. Pure Appl. Math. 51 (1998) 1-21], the a priori estimates found are shown to imply the suitable local Calderón-Zygmund theory for the related class of non-homogeneous, possibly degenerate equations involving discontinuous coefficients. These last results extend to the sub-elliptic setting a few classical non-linear Euclidean results [T. Iwaniec, Projections onto gradient fields and Lp-estimates for degenerated elliptic operators, Studia Math. 75 (1983) 293-312; E. DiBenedetto, J.J. Manfredi, On the higher integrability of the gradient of weak solutions of certain degenerate elliptic systems, Amer. J. Math. 115 (1993) 1107-1134], and to the non-linear case estimates of the same nature that were available in the sub-elliptic setting only for solutions to linear equations.     

A priori estimate for non-uniform elliptic equations

A priori estimate for non-uniform elliptic equations with periodic boundary conditions is concerned. The domain considered consists of two sub-regions, a connected high permeability region and a disconnected matrix block region with low permeability. Let ? denote the size ratio of one matrix block to the whole domain. It is shown that in the connected high permeability sub-region, the Hölder and the Lipschitz estimates of the non-uniform elliptic solutions are bounded uniformly in ?. But Hölder gradient estimate and Lp estimate of the second order derivatives of the solutions in general are not bounded uniformly in ?.     

Global pointwise estimates for Green's matrix of second order elliptic systems

We establish global pointwise bounds for the Green's matrix for divergence form, second order elliptic systems in a domain under the assumption that weak solutions of the system vanishing on a portion of the boundary satisfy a certain local boundedness estimate. Moreover, we prove that such a local boundedness estimate for weak solutions of the system is equivalent to the usual global pointwise bound for the Green's matrix. In the scalar case, such an estimate is a consequence of De Giorgi-Moser-Nash theory and holds for equations with bounded measurable coefficients in arbitrary domains. In the vectorial case, one need to impose certain assumptions on the coefficients of the system as well as on domains to obtain such an estimate. We present a unified approach valid for both the scalar and vectorial cases and discuss several applications of our result.     

Small amplitude steady internal waves in stratified fluids

We study the weakly non linear solutions of theDubreil-Jacotin—Long elliptic equation in a strip, which describes two dimensional gravity internal waves propagating steadily in a stratified fluid. In the neighborhood of the first critical value of the Froude number, the center manifold theorem ensures that small solutions are parametrized by two coordinates which verify a system of nonlinear ordinary differential equations. We compute numerically the coefficients of the normal form of this reduced system for a three parameters family of stratifications and show that the quadratic coefficient (the most important) may become small. In that case, nonusual waves such as fronts can propagate. The last part of our work studies the case when a smooth stratification converges towards a piecewise constant profile having one discontinuity. We observe formally that the small waves which propagate at the interface of two homogeneous fluids are limits at leading order of waves travelling in the region where the smooth density varies rapidly.     

A class of quasilinear degenerate elliptic problems

We establish the existence of solutions for a class of quasilinear degenerate elliptic equations. The equations in this class satisfy a structure condition which provides ellipticity in the interior of the domain, and degeneracy only on the boundary. Equations of transonic gas dynamics, for example, satisfy this property in the region of subsonic flow and are degenerate across the sonic surface. We prove that the solution is smooth in the interior of the domain but may exhibit singular behavior at the degenerate boundary. The maximal rate of blow-up at the degenerate boundary is bounded by the “degree of degeneracy” in the principal coefficients of the quasilinear elliptic operator. Our methods and results apply to the problems recently studied by several authors which include the unsteady transonic small disturbance equation, the pressure-gradient equations of the compressible Euler equations, and the singular quasilinear anisotropic elliptic problems, and extend to the class of equations which satisfy the structure condition, such as the shallow water equation, compressible isentropic two-dimensional Euler equations, and general two-dimensional nonlinear wave equations. Our study provides a general framework to analyze degenerate elliptic problems arising in the self-similar reduction of a broad class of two-dimensional Cauchy problems.     

Asymptotics of Green functions and Martin boundaries for elliptic operators with periodic coefficients

We give the asymptotics at infinity of a Green function for an elliptic equation with periodic coefficients on R^d. Basic ingredients in establishing the asymptotics are an integral representation of the Green function and the saddle point method. We also completely determine the Martin compactification of R^d with respect to an elliptic equation with periodic coefficients by using the exact asymptotics at infinity of the Green function.     

A control condition for a weak Harnack inequality

We introduce a new condition allowing to get a weak Harnack   inequality for non-negative solutions to linear second order degenerate elliptic equations of X$X$-elliptic type. Roughly speaking, our condition requires that the Euclidean balls of small radius are representable by means of X$X$-controllable almost exponential maps.     

The Calderón-Zygmund property for quasilinear divergence form equations over Reifenberg flat domains

The results by Palagachev (2009) [3] regarding global Hölder continuity for the weak solutions to quasilinear divergence form elliptic equations are generalized to the case of nonlinear terms with optimal growths with respect to the unknown function and its gradient. Moreover, the principal coefficients are discontinuous with discontinuity measured in terms of small BMO norms and the underlying domain is supposed to have fractal boundary satisfying a condition of Reifenberg flatness. The results are extended to the case of parabolic operators as well.     

Maximum principles for weak solutions of degenerate elliptic equations with a uniformly elliptic direction

For second order linear equations and inequalities which are degenerate elliptic but which possess a uniformly elliptic direction, we formulate and prove weak maximum principles which are compatible with a solvability theory in suitably weighted versions of L²-based Sobolev spaces. The operators are not necessarily in divergence form, have terms of lower order, and have low regularity assumptions on the coefficients. The needed weighted Sobolev spaces are, in general, anisotropic spaces defined by a non-negative continuous matrix weight. As preparation, we prove a Poincaré inequality with respect to such matrix weights and analyze the elementary properties of the weighted spaces. Comparisons to known results and examples of operators which are elliptic away from a hyperplane of arbitrary codimension are given. Finally, in the important special case of operators whose principal part is of Grushin type, we apply these results to obtain some spectral theory results such as the existence of a principal eigenvalue.     

Regularity of the extremal solution for some elliptic problems with singular nonlinearity and advection

In this note, we investigate the regularity of the extremal solution u^? for the semilinear elliptic equation −△u+c(x)⋅∇u=λf(u) on a bounded smooth domain of Rn with Dirichlet boundary condition. Here f is a positive nondecreasing convex function, exploding at a finite value a∈(0,∞). We show that the extremal solution is regular in the low-dimensional case. In particular, we prove that for the radial case, all extremal solutions are regular in dimension two.     

Maximal parabolic regularity for divergence operators including mixed boundary conditions

We show that elliptic second order operators A of divergence type fulfill maximal parabolic regularity on distribution spaces, even if the underlying domain is highly non-smooth, the coefficients of A are discontinuous and A is complemented with mixed boundary conditions. Applications to quasilinear parabolic equations with non-smooth data are presented.     

Fine regularity for elliptic systems with discontinuous ingredients

We propose results on interior Morrey, BMO and H?lder regularity for the strong solutions to linear elliptic systems of order 2b with discontinuous coefficients and right-hand sides belonging to the Morrey space L^p,λ. Received: 20 October 2004     

On symmetry of nonnegative solutions of elliptic equations

We consider the Dirichlet problem for a class of fully nonlinear elliptic equations on a bounded domain Ω. We assume that Ω is symmetric about a hyperplane H and convex in the direction perpendicular to H. By a well-known result of Gidas, Ni and Nirenberg and its generalizations, all positive solutions are reflectionally symmetric about H and decreasing away from the hyperplane in the direction orthogonal to H. For nonnegative solutions, this result is not always true. We show that, nonetheless, the symmetry part of the result remains valid for nonnegative solutions: any nonnegative solution u is symmetric about H  . Moreover, we prove that if u?0$u?0$, then the nodal set of u divides the domain Ω into a finite number of reflectionally symmetric subdomains in which u has the usual Gidas–Ni–Nirenberg symmetry and monotonicity properties. We also show several examples of nonnegative solutions with a nonempty interior nodal set.     

Positive solutions of quasilinear parabolic systems with Dirichlet boundary condition

Coupled systems for a class of quasilinear parabolic equations and the corresponding elliptic systems, including systems of parabolic and ordinary differential equations are investigated. The aim of this paper is to show the existence, uniqueness, and asymptotic behavior of time-dependent solutions. Also investigated is the existence of positive maximal and minimal solutions of the corresponding quasilinear elliptic system. The elliptic operators in both systems are allowed to be degenerate in the sense that the density-dependent diffusion coefficients Di(ui) may have the property Di(0)=0 for some or all i=1,…,N, and the boundary condition is ui=0. Using the method of upper and lower solutions, we show that a unique global classical time-dependent solution exists and converges to the maximal solution for one class of initial functions and it converges to the minimal solution for another class of initial functions; and if the maximal and minimal solutions coincide then the steady-state solution is unique and the time-dependent solution converges to the unique solution. Applications of these results are given to three model problems, including a scalar polynomial growth problem, a coupled system of polynomial growth problem, and a two component competition model in ecology.     

Partial regularity of stable solutions to the supercritical equations and its applications

We prove the partial regularity of stable solutions of supercritical elliptic equations. As an application, we prove that any smooth stable entire solution to supercritical equations with p$p$ in a suitable range is radially symmetric.     

Reaction-diffusion systems coupled at the boundary and the Morse-Smale property

We study an one-dimensional nonlinear reaction-diffusion system coupled on the boundary. Such system comes from modeling problems of temperature distribution on two bars of same length, jointed together, with different diffusion coefficients.We prove the transversality property of unstable and stable manifolds assuming all equilibrium points are hyperbolic. To this end, we write the system as an equation with noncontinuous diffusion coefficient. We then study the nonincreasing property of the number of zeros of a linearized nonautonomous equation as well as the Sturm-Liouville properties of the solutions of a linear elliptic problem.     

Zero sets of solutions to semilinear elliptic systems of first order

Consider a nontrivial smooth solution to a semilinear elliptic system of first order with smooth coefficients defined over an n-dimensional manifold. Assume the operator has the strong unique continuation property. We show that the zero set of the solution is contained in a countable union of smooth (n−2)-dimensional submanifolds. Hence it is countably (n−2)-rectifiable and its Hausdorff dimension is at most n−2. Moreover, it has locally finite (n−2)-dimensional Hausdorff measure. We show by example that every real number between 0 and n−2 actually occurs as the Hausdorff dimension (for a suitable choice of operator). We also derive results for scalar elliptic equations of second order. Oblatum 22-V-1998 & 26-III-1999 / Published online: 10 June 1999