Characterization of $f$-extremal disks

TL;DR

This paper proves the uniqueness and symmetry of solutions to overdetermined elliptic problems on topological disks in the sphere, confirming a conjecture and classifying harmonic domains in that setting.

Contribution

It adapts the generalized Hopf theorem to overdetermined elliptic problems on the sphere and confirms the Berestycki-Caffarelli-Nirenberg conjecture for specific functions.

Findings

Solutions are rotationally symmetric on geodesic disks in ^2.

Overdetermined problems have unique solutions that are geodesic disks.

Classifies simply-connected harmonic domains in ^2.

Abstract

We show uniqueness for overdetermined elliptic problems defined on topological disks $\Omega$ with $C^2$ boundary, i.e., positive solutions $u$ to $\Delta u + f(u)=0$ in $\Omega \subset (M^2,g)$ so that $u = 0$ and $\frac{\partial u}{\partial \vec\eta} = cte $ along $\partial \Omega$, $\vec\eta$ the unit outward normal along $\partial\Omega$ under the assumption of the existence of a candidate family. To do so, we adapt the G\'alvez-Mira generalized Hopf-type Theorem to the realm of overdetermined elliptic problem. When $(M^2,g)$ is the standard sphere $\mathbb S^2$ and $f$ is a $C^1$ function so that $f(x)>0$ and $f(x)\ge x \, f'(x)$ for any $x\in\mathbb R_+^*$, we construct such candidate family considering rotationally symmetric solutions. This proves the Berestycki-Caffarelli-Nirenberg conjecture in $\mathbb S^2$ for this choice of $f$. More precisely, this shows that if $u$ is a positive solution to $\Delta u + f(u) = 0$ on a topological disk $\Omega \subset \mathbb S^2$ with $C^2$ boundary so that $u = 0$ and $\frac{\partial u}{\partial \vec\eta} = cte $ along $\partial \Omega$, then $\Omega$ must be a geodesic disk and $u$ is rotationally symmetric. In particular, this gives a positive answer to the Schiffer conjecture D for the first Dirichlet eigenvalue and classifies simply-connected harmonic domains, also called {\it Serrin Problem}) in $\mathbb S ^2$.