Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Infinitely Many Rotationally Symmetric Solutions To A Class Of Semilinear Laplace-Beltrami Equations On The Unit Sphere, Emily M. Fischer

HMC Senior Theses

I show that a class of semilinear Laplace-Beltrami equations has infinitely many solutions on the unit sphere which are symmetric with respect to rotations around some axis. This equation corresponds to a singular ordinary differential equation, which we solve using energy analysis. We obtain a Pohozaev-type identity to prove that the energy is continuously increasing with the initial condition and then use phase plane analysis to prove the existence of infinitely many solutions.