Coincidence sets in semilinear elliptic problems of logistic type

Abstract

This paper concerns the formation of a coincidence set for the positive solution of an equation of the type: $-{\varepsilon} \Delta u=u|a(x)-u|^{\theta} {\operatorname{sgn}} (a(x)-u)$, where ${\varepsilon}$ is a positive parameter, $0 < \theta < 1$ and $a(x)$ is a positive continuous function. Suppose that $\Delta a=0$ in an open subset ${\Omega}_0 \subset {\Omega}$. The positive solution converges to $a(x)$ uniformly on any compact subset of $\Omega$ as ${\varepsilon} \to 0$. It is proved that when ${\varepsilon}$ is sufficiently small, the solution coincides with $a(x)$ somewhere in ${\Omega}_0$ and the coincidence set converges to ${\Omega}_0$ in the Hausdorff distance with the order of $\sqrt{{\varepsilon}}$ as ${\varepsilon} \to 0$. The proof relies on the comparison principle with suitable local comparison functions.