A gluing approach for the fractional Yamabe problem with isolated singularities

Abstract

Abstract We construct solutions for the fractional Yamabe problem that are singular at a prescribed number of isolated points. This seems to be the first time that a gluing method is successfully applied to a non-local problem in order to construct singular solutions. There are two main steps in the proof: to construct an approximate solution by gluing half bubble towers at each singular point, and then an infinite-dimensional Lyapunov–Schmidt reduction method, that reduces the problem to an (infinite-dimensional) Toda-type system. The main technical part is the estimate of the interactions between different bubbles in the bubble towers.