Bubbling phenomenon for semilinear Neumann elliptic equations of critical exponential growth

Abstract

In the past few decades, much attention has been paid to the bubbling problem for semilinear Neumann elliptic equation with the critical and subcritical polynomial nonlinearity, much less is known if the polynomial nonlinearity is replaced by the exponential nonlinearity. In this paper, we consider the following semilinear Neumann elliptic problem with the Trudinger-Moser exponential growth: \begin{equation*}\begin{cases} -d\Delta u_d+u_d=u_d(e^{u^2_{d}}-1)\ \ \mbox{in}\ \Omega,\\ \frac{\partial u_d}{\partial\nu}=0\ \ \ \ \ \ \ \ \ \ \ \ \ \ \ \ \ \ \ \ \ \ \ \ \mbox{on}\ \partial \Omega,\\ \end{cases}\end{equation*} where $d>0$ is a parameter, $\Omega$ is a smooth bounded domain in $\mathbb{R}^2$, $\nu$ is the unit outer normal to $\partial \Omega$. We first prove the existence of a ground state solution to the above equation. If $d$ is sufficiently small, we prove that any ground state solution $u_d$ has at most one maximum point which is located on the boundary of $\Omega$ and characterize the shape of ground state solution $u_d$ around the condensation point $P_d$. The key point of the proof lies in proving that the maximum point $P_d$ is close to the boundary at the speed of $\sqrt{d}$ when $d\rightarrow0$ and $u_d$ under suitable scaling transform converges strongly to the ground state solution of the limit equation $\Delta w+w=w(e^{w^2}-1)$. Our proof is based on the energy threshold of cut-off function, the concentration compactness principle for the Trudinger-Moser inequality, regularity theory for elliptic equation and an accurate analysis for the energy of the ground state solution $u_d$ as $d\rightarrow0$. Furthermore, by assuming that $\Omega$ is a unit disk, we remove the smallness assumption on $d$ and show the maximum point of ground state solution $u_d$ must lie on the boundary of $\Omega$ for any $d>0$.