Positive solutions to semipositone problems on Heisenberg group

TL;DR

This paper proves the existence and positivity of solutions to semipositone differential problems on the Heisenberg group, using variational methods and regularity analysis, addressing a previously unexplored setting.

Contribution

It introduces the first analysis of semipositone problems on the Heisenberg group, establishing existence, regularity, and positivity of solutions with new techniques.

Findings

Existence of weak solutions via mountain pass technique.

Solutions converge uniformly to a positive function as parameter tends to zero.

Positivity of solutions established under additional hypotheses.

Abstract

This article focuses on establishing a positive weak solution to a class of semipositone problems over the Heisenberg group $\mathbb{H}^N$. In particular, we are interested in the positive weak solution to the following problem: \begin{equation}\label{p1} -\Delta_{\mathbb{H}}u= g(\xi)f_a(u) \text{ in } \mathbb{H}^N \tag{$P_a$}, \end{equation} where $a>0$ is a real parameter and $g$ is a positive function. The function $f_a: \mathbb{R} \rightarrow \mathbb{R}$ is continuous and of semipositone type which means it becomes negative on some parts of the domain. Due to this sign-changing nonlinearity, we can not directly apply the maximum principle to obtain the positivity of the solution to \eqref{p1}. For that purpose, we need some regularity results for our solutions. In this direction, we first prove the existence of weak solutions to \eqref{p1} via the mountain pass technique. Further, we establish some regularity properties of our solutions and using that we prove the $L^\infty$-norm convergence of the sequence of solutions $\{u_a\}$ to a positive function $u$ as $a \rightarrow 0$, which yields $u_a \geq 0$ for $a$ sufficiently small. Finally, we use the Riesz-representation formula to obtain the positivity of solutions under some extra hypothesis on $f_0$ and $g$. To the best of our knowledge, there is no article dealing with semipositone problems in Heisenberg group set up.