Advances in Pure Mathematics
Vol.2 No.6(2012), Article ID:24390,5 pages DOI:10.4236/apm.2012.26061
Uniqueness of Radial Solutions for Elliptic Equation Involving the Pucci Operator*
Department of Mathematics and Physics, North China Electric Power University, Beijing, China
Email: liuyong@ncepu.edu.cn
Received July 28, 2012; revised August 30, 2012; accepted September 21, 2012
Keywords: Pucci Operator; Radial Solution; Uniqueness; Super Linear
ABSTRACT
The solution of a nonlinear elliptic equation involving Pucci maximal operator and super linear nonlinearity is studied. Uniqueness results of positive radial solutions in the annulus with Dirichlet boundary condition are obtained. The main tool is Lane-Emden transformation and Koffman type analysis. This is a generalization of the corresponding classical results involving Laplace operator.
1. Introduction
We study the nonlinear elliptic equation
(1)
where
is Pucci maximal operator, the potential f is super linear with some further constraints. Using
to denote the eigenvalues of
then explicitly, the Pucci operator
is given by
For more detailed discussion, see for example [1,2]. This equation has been extensively studied, see [3-5], etc. and the references therein.
Normalize to be
for simplicity. We will in this paper investigate the uniqueness of
positive radial solution of (1) in the annulus
with Dirichlet boundary condition. In this case, Equation (1) reduces to
(2)
where
Throughout the paper, we assume Note that
Now we could state our main results.
Theorem 1. Suppose is small enough and
Then (2) has at most one positive solution with Dirichlet boundary condition.
If instead of the smallness of we assume further growing condition on
then we have the following Theorem 2. Suppose that for
,
where
Then (2) has at most one positive solution with Dirichlet boundary condition.
In the case the Pucci operator reduces to the usual Laplace operator, and the corresponding unique results are proved by Ni and Nussbaum in [6].
We also remark that the above theorems could be generalized to nonlinearities which also depends on
We will not pursue this further in this paper.
2. Lane-Emden Transformation and Uniqueness of the Radial Solutions
2.1. Proof of Theorem 1
We shall perform a Lane-Emden type transformation to Equation (2). Let us introduce a new function
where with
Then satisfies
(3)
where we have denoted
and Note that m may not be continuous at the points where
or
Additionally, if
and
then
Lemma 3. Let w be a positive solution of (3) with Then there exists
such that
and
Proof. If for some
then
The conclusion of the lemma follows immediately from this inequality. ■
Given the solution of (3) with
and
will be denoted by
. Let
By standard argument, we know that positive solution of (3) with Dirichlet boundary condition is unique if we could show that
whenever is a positive solution to (3) with
The functions and
satisfy the following equations:
The initial condition satisfied by is:
,
.
Now let be a positive constant such that
is a positive solution to (3) with
. To show that
, let us first prove that
must vanish at some point in the interval
In the following, we write
simply as
Lemma 4. There exists such that
.
Proof. Let us consider the function
We have
We remark that is indeed not everywhere differentiable, since m is not continuous. It however could be shown that the jump points of m are isolated. Here by
, we mean the derivative of
at the point where it is differentiable. The same remark applies to the functions
and
below.
Now if for
then
Since we infer that
It follows that
This is a contradiction, since and
. ■
With the above lemma at hand, we wish to show that in the interval
vanishes at only one point ξ. For this purpose, let us define functions
and
Put
and
Lemma 5. We have
(4)
(5)
Proof. Differentiate the Equation (3) with respect to s gives us
(6)
Hence
As to the function h, there holds
Combining this with (3) and (6) we get
It follows that
■
Now we are ready to prove Theorem 1.
Proof of Theorem 1. We need to show that.
We first of all claim that the first zero of
in
must stay in the interval
where
is given by Lemma 3. Suppose to the contrary that
By (5) using the fact that
we find that if
is small enough, then in the interval
Since we find that
Therefore
This is a contradiction, since and
Now the first zero of
lies in
If
then the second zero
of
lies in
Note that in
Therefore, by identity (4)
This together with
implies that
but this contradicts with,
, and
This finishes the proof. ■
2.2. Proof of Theorem 2
Similar arguments as that of Theorem 1 could be used to prove Theorem 2. In this case, we shall make the following transform:
where
and Then
(7)
With this transformation, in the interval
, w satisfies
(8)
where
By the definition of one could verify that
Note that
and
are step functions and not continous.
Let be the solution of (8) with
and
. Now similar as in the proof of Theorem 1, we suppose
is a positive solution with Dirichlet boundary condition and
. We have the following lemma, whose proof will be omitted.
Lemma 6. There exists such that
, and
With this lemma at hand, we observe that by (8)
This combined with (7) tells us that Then it is not difficult to show that for
and
while for
Recall that satisfies
Consider the function then
From this we infer that the function must change sign in the interval
similar as that of Theorem 1.
Now let us define
and
where and
Moreover, denote
Lemma 7. There holds
Proof. Direct calculation shows
and
This then leads to the desired identity. ■
Now with the help of this lemma, we could prove Theorem 2.
Proof of Theorem 2. First we show the first zero of
is in the interval
Otherwise, since
one could then use the fact that in
and
to deduce that in
But this contradicts with and
.
Now if the second zero of
is in
Then since
one could use in
to deduce that
in
which contradicts with
and
■
3. Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Prof. P. Felmer for useful discussion.
REFERENCES
- D. Gilbarg and N. S. Trudinger, “Elliptic Partial Differential Equations of Second Order,” Springer-Verlag, Berlin, 2001.
- L. A. Caffarelli and X. Cabre, “Fully Nonlinear Elliptic Equations,” American Mathematical Society Colloquium Publications, Providence, 1995.
- D. A. Labutin, “Removable Singularities for Fully Nonlinear Elliptic Equations,” Archive for Rational Mechanics and Analysis, Vol. 155, No. 3, 2000, pp. 201-214.
- P. L. Felmer and A. Quaas, “Critical Exponents for Uniformly Elliptic Extremal Operators,” Indiana University Mathematics Journal, Vol. 55, No. 2, 2006, pp. 593-629.
- P. L. Felmer and A. Quaas, “On Critical Exponents for the Pucci’s Extremal Operators,” Annales de l’Institut Henri Poincaré, Vol. 20, No. 5, 2003, pp. 843-865.
- W. M. Ni and R. D. Nussbaum, “Uniqueness and Nonuniqueness for Positive Radial Solutions of
” Communications on Pure and Applied Mathematics, Vol. 38, No. 1, 1985, pp. 67-108.
NOTES
*The author is supported by NSFC under grant 11101141; SRF for ROCS, SEM; DF of NCEPU.