Abstract. In R m × R n−m , endowed with coordinates X = (x, y), we consider the PDE −div`α(x)|∇u(X)| p(x)−2 ∇u(X)´= f (x, u(X)).We prove a geometric inequality and a symmetry result.EV is supported by MIUR, project "Variational methods and Nonlinear Differential Equations".
IntroductionThe purpose of this paper is to give some geometric results on the following problem:, with p(x) ≥ 2 for any x ∈ R m , and Ω is an open subset of R n .As well known, the operator in (1.1) comprises, as main example, the degenerate p(x)-Laplacian (and, in particular, the degenerate p-Laplacian). The motivation of this paper is the following. In [15], it was asked whether or not the level sets of bounded, monotone, global solutions offor X ∈ R n , are flat hyperplanes, at least when n ≤ 8.In spite of the marvelous progress performed in this direction (see, in particular, [43, 8, 31, 32, 7, 5, 46, 16]), part of the conjecture and many related problems are still unsolved (see [27]).In [47], the following generalization of (1.2) was taken into account:where, as above, the notation X = (x, y) ∈ R m × R n−m is used.
1We observe that when f (x, u) does not depend on x, then (1.3) reduces to a usual semilinar equation, of which (1.2) represents the chief example. When f (x, u) depends on x, the dependence on the space variable of f changes only with respect to a subset of the variables, namely the nonlinearity takes no dependence on y.In particular, for fixed u ∈ R, we have that f (x, u) is constant on the "vertical fibers" {x = c}, and for this the nonlinearity in (1.3) is called "fibered". Moreover, the model in (1.3) was considered in [47] as a sort of interpolation between the classical semilinear equation in (1.2) and the boundary reactions PDEs of [11,49], which are related to fractional power operators (see also [12]