Sharp estimates for bubbling solutions of a fourth order mean field equation

Lin, Chang-Shou; Wei, Juncheng

Annali della Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa - Classe di Scienze, Serie 5, Volume 6 (2007) no. 4, pp. 599-630.

We consider a sequence of multi-bubble solutions $u_k$ of the following fourth order equation

$${\Delta }^2{u}_k={\rho }_k\frac{h\left(x\right)e^{u_k}}{{\int }_{\Omega }h{e}^{u_k}}\text{in}\Omega ,u_k=\Delta u_k=0\text{on}\partial \Omega ,(*)$$

where $h$ is a $C^{2,\beta }$ positive function, $\Omega$ is a bounded and smooth domain in ${ℝ}^4$, and ${\rho }_k$ is a constant such that ${\rho }_k\le C$. We show that (after extracting a subsequence), ${lim}_{k\to +\infty }{\rho }_k=32{\sigma }_{3}m$ for some positive integer $m\ge 1$, where ${\sigma }_3$ is the area of the unit sphere in ${ℝ}^4$. Furthermore, we obtain the following sharp estimates for ${\rho }_k$:

$$\begin{array}{cc}\hfill {\rho }_k-32{\sigma }_{3}m& =c_0\sum _{j=1}^m{ϵ}_{k,j}^2\left(\sum _{l\ne j}\Delta G_4(p_j,p_l)+\Delta R_4(p_j,p_j)+\frac{1}{32{\sigma }_3}\Delta logh\left(p_j\right)\right)\hfill \\ & +o\left(\sum _{j=1}^m{ϵ}_{k,j}^2\right)\hfill \end{array}$$

where $c_0>0$, $log\frac{64}{{ϵ}_{k,j}^4}=\underset{x\in B_{\delta }\left(p_j\right)}{max}{u}_k\left(x\right)-log\left(\underset{\Omega }{\int }h{e}^{u_k}\right)$ and $u_k\to 32{\sigma }_3\sum _{j=1}^m{G}_4(·,p_j)$ in $C_{\mathrm{loc}}^4(\Omega \setminus \{p_1,...,p_m\})$. This yields a bound of solutions as ${\rho }_k$ converges to $32{\sigma }_{3}m$ from below provided that

$$\sum _{j=1}^m\left(\sum _{l\ne j}\Delta G_4(p_j,p_l)+\Delta R_4(p_j,p_j)+\frac{1}{32{\sigma }_3}\Delta logh\left(p_j\right)\right)>0.$$

The analytic work of this paper is the first step toward computing the Leray-Schauder degree of solutions of equation $(*)$.

Classification: 35B40, 35B45, 35J40

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