Symmetry of bounded solutions to quasilinear elliptic equations in a half-space

TL;DR

This paper proves that bounded positive solutions to certain quasilinear elliptic equations in a half-space are symmetric and monotone in the vertical direction, extending classical symmetry results to the p-Laplacian case.

Contribution

It extends the classical symmetry result of Berestycki, Caffarelli, and Nirenberg to the p-Laplacian case under mild conditions on the nonlinearity.

Findings

Solutions depend only on the vertical coordinate

Solutions are monotone increasing in the vertical direction

Extension of classical symmetry results to p-Laplacian equations

Abstract

Let $u$ be a bounded positive solution to the problem $-\Delta_p u = f(u)$ in $\mathbb{R}^N_+$ with zero Dirichlet boundary condition, where $p>1$ and $f$ is a locally Lipschitz continuous function. Among other things, we show that if $f(\sup_{\mathbb{R}^N_+} u)=0$ and $f$ satisfies some other mild conditions, then $u$ depends only on $x_N$ and monotone increasing in the $x_N$-direction. Our result partially extends a classical result of Berestycki, Caffarelli and Nirenberg in 1993 to the $p$-Laplacian.