A priori estimates for semistable solutions of semilinear elliptic equations

Abstract

We consider positive semistable solutions $u$ of $Lu+f(u)=0$ with zero Dirichlet boundary condition, where $L$ is a uniformly elliptic operator and $f\in C^2$ is a positive, nondecreasing, and convex nonlinearity which is superlinear at infinity. Under these assumptions, the boundedness of all semistable solutions is expected up to dimension $n\leq 9$, but only established for $n\leq 4$. In this paper we prove the $L^\infty$ bound up to dimension $n=5$ under the following further assumption on $f$: for every $\varepsilon>0$, there exist $T=T(\varepsilon)$ and $C=C(\varepsilon)$ such that $f'(t)\leq Cf(t)^{1+\varepsilon}$ for all $t>T$. This bound will follow from a $L^p$-estimate for $f'(u)$ for every $p<3$ (and for all $n\geq 2$). Under a similar but more restrictive assumption on $f$, we also prove the $L^\infty$ estimate when $n=6$. We remark that our results do not assume any lower bound on $f'$.