Entire Solutions of Semilinear Elliptic Equations in ^3 and a Conjecture of De Giorgi
- Xavier Cabre (Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya, Barcelona)
Abstract
We consider bounded entire solutions of semilinear
elliptic equations of the form
u = F'(u) in R3,
satisfying
x3 u > 0 in
R3 and
u(x1,x2,x3)
1 as x3
.
We do not assume these limits to be uniform
with respect to (x1,x2). Under the hypothesis that
F min{F(1),F(-1)} in [-1,1]
, we prove that the level
sets of u are planes. That is, u is a function of
one variable only. This establishes in dimension three a
conjecture formulated by De Giorgi in 1978. In dimension two,
this conjecture was recently proved by Ghoussoub and Gui, and
similar results were obtained by Berestycki, Caffarelli
and Nirenberg. The conjecture remains open in dimension
n 4.
AMS Classification: 35B05, 35B40, 35B45, 35J60
Keywords: Semilinear elliptic PDE,
Symmetry and monotonicity properties, Energy estimates,
Liouville theorems