A prescribed anisotropic mean curvature equation modeling the corneal shape: A paradigm of nonlinear analysis

In this talk, we survey some recent results concerning the Dirichlet problem for the prescribed anisotropic mean curvature equation
\begin{equation*}
{\rm -div}\left({\nabla u}/{\sqrt{1 + |\nabla u|^2}}\right) = -au + {b}/{\sqrt{1 + |\nabla u|^2}},
\end{equation*}
in a bounded Lipschitz domain $\Omega \subset \mathbb{R}^n$, with $a,b>0$ parameters.
This equation appears in the description of the geometry of the human cornea, as well as in the modeling theory of capillarity phenomena for compressible fluids.

In this talk, we show how various techniques of nonlinear functional analysis can successfully be applied to derive a complete picture of the solvability patterns of the problem.


This seminar is organized within the PRIN 2015 Research project «Partial Differential Equations and related Analytic-Geometric Inequalities» Grant Registration number 2015HY8JCC _003, funded by MIUR – Project coordinator Prof. Filippo Gazzola