Positive solutions to general semilinear overdetermined boundary problems

Abstract

We establish the existence of positive solutions to a general class of overdetermined semilinear elliptic boundary problems on suitable bounded open sets $Ω\subset\mathbb{R}^n$. Specifically, for $n\leq 4$ and under mild technical hypotheses on the coefficients and the nonlinearity, we show that there exist open sets $Ω\subset\mathbb{R}^n$ with smooth boundary and of any prescribed volume where the overdetermined problem admits a positive solution. The proof builds on ideas of Alt and Caffarelli on variational problems for functions defined on a bounded region. In our case, we need to consider functions defined on the whole $\mathbb{R}^n$, so the key challenge is to obtain uniform bounds for the minimizer and for the diameter of its support. Our methods extend to higher dimensions, although in this case the free boundary $\partialΩ$ could have a singular set of codimension 5. The results are new even in the case of the Poisson equation $-Δv =g(x)$ with constant Neumann data.