Rigidity of weak solutions for anisotropic N-Laplacian equation with Neumann or Robin boundary condition

Abstract

This paper is devoted to the rigidity of weak solutions for anisotropic $N$-Laplacian equations with Neumann or Robin boundary conditions on smooth bounded convex domains of $\mathbb{R}^N$. The anisotropic operator is given by $$a(\xi) = H^{N-1}(\xi)\nabla H(\xi),$$ where $H$ stands for a norm on $\mathbb{R}^N$; this formulation contains the classical $N$-Laplacian as a special case. We establish a key integral inequality involving the anisotropic gradient and the second fundamental form of the domain boundary, which acts as the core technical tool in our proofs. Under natural monotonicity assumptions on the nonlinearity, we prove that all weak solutions to the Neumann boundary problem are constant, without requiring any a priori boundedness assumption on the solution. Furthermore, we extend this rigidity result to Robin boundary value problems by imposing suitable constraints on the boundary nonlinear term. Moreover, our rigidity results remain valid not only on bounded convex domains but also on suitable unbounded domains. By working under substantially weaker assumptions than those previously available, we establish rigidity results that fill the gaps in the existing literature for anisotropic $N$-Laplacian equations with nonlinear boundary conditions and substantially extend the rigidity theory of anisotropic quasilinear elliptic equations at the critical exponent $p=N$.