Critical points of solutions to a kind of linear elliptic equations in multiply connected domains

Abstract

In this paper, we mainly study the critical points and critical zero points of solutions u to a kind of linear elliptic equations with nonhomogeneous Dirichlet boundary conditions in a multiply connected domain Ω in ℝ2. Based on the delicate analysis about the distributions of connected components of the super-level sets {x ∈ Ω: u(x) > t} and sub-level sets {x ∈ Ω: u(x) < t} for some t, we obtain the geometric structure of interior critical point sets of u. Precisely, let Ω be a multiply connected domain with the interior boundary γI and the external boundary γE, where u∣γI = ψ1(x), u∣γE = ψ2(x). When ψ1(x) and ψ2(x) have N1 and N2 local maximal points on γI and γE respectively, we deduce that \(\sum\nolimits_{i = 1}^k {{m_i} \le {N_1} + {N_2}} \), where m1,…,mk are the respective multiplicities of interior critical points x1,…,xk of u. In addition, when \({\min _{{\gamma _E}}}{\psi _2}\left( x \right) \ge {\max _{{\gamma _I}}}{\psi _1}\left( x \right)\) and u has only N1 and N2 equal local maxima relative to \(\overline \Omega \) on γI and γe respectively, we develop a new method to show that one of the following three results holds \(\sum\nolimits_{i = 1}^k {{m_i} = {N_1} + {N_2}} \) or \(\sum\nolimits_{i = 1}^k {{m_i} + 1 = {N_1} + {N_2}} \) or \(\sum\nolimits_{i = 1}^k {{m_i} + 2 = {N_1} + {N_2}} \). Moreover, we investigate the geometric structure of interior critical zero points of u. We obtain that the sum of multiplicities of the interior critical zero points of u is less than or equal to the half of the number of its isolated zero points on the boundaries.