Radial solutions and a local bifurcation result for a singular elliptic problem with Neumann condition

Abstract

We study the problem $-\Delta u=\lambda u-u^{-1}$ with a Neumann boundary condition; the peculiarity being the presence of the singular term $-u^{-1}$. We point out that the minus sign in front of the negative power of $u$ is particularly challenging, since no convexity argument can be invoked. Using bifurcation techniques we are able to prove the existence of solution $(u_\lambda,\lambda)$ with $u_\lambda$ approaching the trivial constant solution $u=\lambda^{-1/2}$ and $\lambda$ close to an eigenvalue of a suitable linearized problem. To achieve this we also need to prove a generalization of a classical two-branch bifurcation result for potential operators. Next we study the radial case and show that in this case one of the bifurcation branches is global and we find the asymptotical behavior of such a branch. This results allows to derive the existence of multiple solutions $u$ with $\lambda$ fixed.

Keywords

• singular elliptic equation
• positive solutions
• radial solutions
• variational bifurcation
• two branches