Qualitative properties of singular solutions to fractional elliptic equations

Abstract

In this paper, by the moving spheres method, Caffarelli-Silvestre extension formula and blow-up analysis, we study the local behaviour of nonnegative solutions to fractional elliptic equations \begin{align*} (-\Delta)^{\alpha} u =f(u),~~ x\in \Omega\backslash \Gamma, \end{align*} where $0<\alpha <1$ , $\Omega = \mathbb {R}^{N}$ or $\Omega$ is a smooth bounded domain, $\Gamma$ is a singular subset of $\Omega$ with fractional capacity zero, $f(t)$ is locally bounded and positive for $t\in [0,\,\infty )$ , and $f(t)/t^{({N+2\alpha })/({N-2\alpha })}$ is nonincreasing in $t$ for large $t$ , rather than for every $t>0$ . Our main result is that the solutions satisfy the estimate \begin{align*} f(u(x))/ u(x)\leq C d(x,\Gamma)^{{-}2\alpha}. \end{align*} This estimate is new even for $\Gamma =\{0\}$ . As applications, we derive the spherical Harnack inequality, asymptotic symmetry, cylindrical symmetry of the solutions.