Properties of positive solutions to an elliptic equation with negative exponent

In this paper, we study some quantitative properties of positive solutions to a singular elliptic equation with negative power on the bounded smooth domain or in the whole Euclidean space. Our model arises in the study of the steady states of thin films and other applied physics as well as differential geometry. We can get some useful local gradient estimate and L1 lower bound for positive solutions of the elliptic equation. A uniform positive lower bound for convex positive solutions is also obtained. We show that in lower dimensions, there is no stable positive solutions in the whole space. In the whole space of dimension two, we can show that there is no positive smooth solution with finite Morse index. Symmetry properties of related integral equations are also given. © 2007 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved