On the uniqueness and monotonicity of solutions of free boundary problems

Abstract

For any smooth and bounded domain Ω⊂RN, we prove uniqueness of positive solutions of free boundary problems arising in plasma physics on Ω in a neat interval depending only by the best constant of the Sobolev embedding H01(Ω)↪L2p(Ω), p∈[1,NN−2) and show that the boundary density and a suitably defined energy share a universal monotonic behavior. At least to our knowledge, for p>1, this is the first result about the uniqueness for a domain which is not a two-dimensional ball and in particular the very first result about the monotonicity of solutions, which seems to be new even for p=1. The threshold, which is sharp for p=1, yields a new condition which guarantees that there is no free boundary inside Ω. As a corollary, in the same range, we solve a long-standing open problem (dating back to the work of Berestycki-Brezis in 1980) about the uniqueness of variational solutions. Moreover, on a two-dimensional ball we describe the full branch of positive solutions, that is, we prove the monotonicity along the curve of positive solutions until the boundary density vanishes.