Hopf potentials for the Schrödinger operator

Abstract

We establish the Hopf boundary point lemma for the Schr\"odinger operator $-\Delta + V$ involving potentials $V$ that merely belong to the space $L^{1}_{loc}(\Omega)$. More precisely, we prove that among all supersolutions $u$ of $-\Delta + V$ which vanish on the boundary $\partial\Omega$ and are such that $V u \in L^{1}(\Omega)$, if there exists one supersolution which satisfies $\partial u/\partial n < 0$ almost everywhere on $\partial\Omega$ with respect to the outward unit vector $n$, then such a property holds for every nontrivial supersolution in the same class. We rely on the existence of nontrivial solutions of the nonhomogeneous Dirichlet problem with boundary datum in $L^{\infty}(\partial\Omega)$.