On the global bifurcation diagram of the Gelfand problem

Abstract

For domains of first kind [7,13] we describe the qualitative behavior of the global bifurcation diagram of the unbounded branch of solutions of the Gel'fand problem crossing the origin. At least to our knowledge this is the first result about the exact monotonicity of the branch of non-minimal solutions which is not just concerned with radial solutions [28] and/or with symmetric domains [23]. Toward our goal we parametrize the branch not by the $L^{\infty}(\Omega)$-norm of the solutions but by the energy of the associated mean field problem. The proof relies on a carefully modified spectral analysis of mean field type equations.