Symmetry of the blow-up set of a porous medium type equation

We study the blow-up set of a porous medium type equation with source. Under some technical conditions, we prove that if the blow-up set is a bounded smooth region, then it must be a ball with a certain radius. This problem can be reduced to a sublinear elliptic equation coupled with an overdetermined boundary condition. Roughly speaking, the overdetermined boundary condition forces the domain to be a ball. Because the nonlinear term is sublinear and then non-Lipschitz, many difficulties arise if one wants to use the moving plane method to reach the goal. In particular, the Hopf boundary lemma is not applicable to this problem. Instead, we investigate various related problems in a half space and a problem in the first quadrant of the entire space, and then use the symmetry results obtained for these problems to overcome the obstacles encountered. ©1995 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.