Sharp estimates, uniqueness and spikes condensation for superlinear free boundary problems arising in plasma physics

Abstract

We are concerned with Grad-Shafranov type equations, describing in dimension $N=2$ the equilibrium configurations of a plasma in a Tokamak. We obtain a sharp superlinear generalization of the result of Temam (1977) about the linear case, implying the first general uniqueness result ever for superlinear free boundary problems arising in plasma physics. Previous general uniqueness results of Beresticky-Brezis (1980) were concerned with globally Lipschitz nonlinearities. In dimension $N\geq 3$ the uniqueness result is new but not sharp, motivating the local analysis of a spikes condensation-quantization phenomenon for superlinear and subcritical singularly perturbed Grad-Shafranov type free boundary problems, implying among other things a converse of the results about spikes condensation in Flucher-Wei (1998) and Wei (2001). Interestingly enough, in terms of the "physical" global variables, we come up with a concentration-quantization-compactness result sharing the typical features of critical problems (Yamabe $N\geq 3$, Liouville $N=2$) but in a subcritical setting, the singular behavior being induced by a sort of infinite mass limit, in the same spirit of Brezis-Merle (1991).