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Monotonicity of solutions of quasilinear degenerate elliptic equation in half-spaces

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Abstract

We prove a weak comparison principle in narrow unbounded domains for solutions to \(-\Delta _p u=f(u)\) in the case \(2<p< 3\) and \(f(\cdot )\) is a power-type nonlinearity, or in the case \(p>2\) and \(f(\cdot )\) is super-linear. We exploit it to prove the monotonicity of positive solutions to \(-\Delta _p u=f(u)\) in half spaces (with zero Dirichlet assumption) and therefore to prove some Liouville-type theorems.

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Notes

  1. Note that here \(B_r({x^{\prime }})\) is the ball in \(\mathbb R ^{N-1} \)of radius \(r\) centered at \({x^{\prime }}\).

  2. \(d_0\) will actually depend on the Lipschitz constant \(L_f\) of \(f\) in the interval \([-\max \{\Vert u\Vert _\infty ,\Vert v\Vert _\infty \} ,\max \{\Vert u\Vert _\infty ,\Vert v\Vert _\infty \}]\).

  3. The case \(N=2\) has been already considered in [11].

  4. In the case \(f(0)>0\), the solution does not exist at all.

  5. Note that the condition \(\gamma > N\,-\,2t\) holds true for \(r\approx 1\) and \(\gamma \approx N-2\) that we may assume with no loose of generality.

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Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the anonymous referees for their useful comments and suggestions.

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Correspondence to Berardino Sciunzi.

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In memory of James B. Serrin.

AF and BS were partially supported by ERC-2011-grant: Elliptic PDE’s and symmetry of interfaces and layers for odd nonlinearities. LM and BS were partially supported by PRIN-2011: Variational and Topological Methods in the Study of Nonlinear Phenomena. LM has been partially supported by project MTM2010-18128 of MICINN Spain.

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Farina, A., Montoro, L. & Sciunzi, B. Monotonicity of solutions of quasilinear degenerate elliptic equation in half-spaces. Math. Ann. 357, 855–893 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00208-013-0919-0

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