Existence, Uniqueness, and Regularity Results for Elliptic Equations with Drift Terms in Critical Weak Spaces
Hyunseok Kim, Tai‐Peng Tsai
Abstract
We consider Dirichlet problems for linear elliptic equations of second order in divergence form on a bounded or exterior smooth domain $\Omega$ in $\mathbb{R}^n$, $n \ge 3$, with drifts ${b}$ in the critical weak $L^n$-space $L^{n,\infty}(\Omega ; \mathbb{R}^n )$. First, assuming that the drift ${b}$ has nonnegative weak divergence in $L^{n/2, \infty }(\Omega )$, we establish existence and uniqueness of weak solutions in $W^{1,p}(\Omega)$ or $D^{1,p}(\Omega)$ for any $p$ with $n' = n/(n-1)< p < n$. By duality, a similar result also holds for the dual problem. Next, we prove $W^{1,n+\varepsilon}$- or $W^{2, n/2+\delta}$-regularity of weak solutions of the dual problem for some $\varepsilon, \delta >0$ when the domain $\Omega$ is bounded. These gradient estimates go beyond the borderlines and are based on the global Hölder regularity by the De Giorgi--Nash--Moser methods as well as the Miranda--Nirenberg interpolation inequalities. By duality, these results enable us to obtain a quite general uniqueness result as well as an existence result for weak solutions belonging to $\bigcap_{p< n' }W^{1,p}(\Omega)$. Finally, we prove a uniqueness result for exterior problems, which implies in particular that (very weak) solutions are unique in both $L^{n/(n-2),\infty}(\Omega)$ and $L^{n,\infty}(\Omega )$.