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Graphical solutions to one-phase free boundary problems

  • Max Engelstein EMAIL logo , Xavier Fernández-Real und Hui Yu
Veröffentlicht/Copyright: 27. Oktober 2023

Abstract

We study viscosity solutions to the classical one-phase problem and its thin counterpart. In low dimensions, we show that when the free boundary is the graph of a continuous function, the solution is the half-plane solution. This answers, in the salient dimensions, a one-phase free boundary analogue of Bernstein’s problem for minimal surfaces. As an application, we also classify monotone solutions of semilinear equations with a bump-type nonlinearity.

Funding statement: Max Engelstein was partially supported by NSF DMS 2000288 and NSF CAREER 2143719. Xavier Fernández-Real was supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNF grants 200021_182565 and PZ00P2_208930), by the Swiss State Secretariat for Education, Research and lnnovation (SERI) under contract number MB22.00034, and by the AEI project PID2021-125021NAI00 (Spain). Hui Yu was supported by the Presidential Young Professor Fund (National University of Singapore).

Acknowledgements

This paper was finished while the first and third authors were in residence at Institut Mittag-Leffler for the program on “Geometric Aspects of Nonlinear Partial Differential Equations”. They thank the institute for its hospitality. The authors would also like to thank Yash Jhaveri for fruitful discussions on the topics of this paper. All three authors would like to thank the anonymous referee for their careful reading and many comments which improved the manuscript.

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Received: 2023-03-08
Revised: 2023-08-07
Published Online: 2023-10-27
Published in Print: 2023-11-01

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