Quasilinear Riccati type equations with oscillatory and singular data

Abstract

We characterize the existence of solutions to the quasilinear Riccati type equation \begin{eqnarray*} \left\{ \begin{array}{rcl} -{\rm div}\,\mathcal{A}(x, \nabla u)&=& |\nabla u|^q + \sigma \quad \text{in} ~\Omega, \\ u&=&0 \quad \text{on}~ \partial \Omega, \end{array}\right. \end{eqnarray*} with a distributional or measure datum $\sigma$. Here ${\rm div}\,\mathcal{A}(x, \nabla u)$ is a quasilinear elliptic operator modeled after the $p$-Laplacian ($p>1$), and $\Omega$ is a bounded domain whose boundary is sufficiently flat (in the sense of Reifenberg). For distributional data, we assume that $p>1$ and $q>p$. For measure data, we assume that they are compactly supported in $\Omega$, $p>\frac{3n-2}{2n-1}$, and $q$ is in the sub-linear range $p-1<q<1$. We also assume more regularity conditions on $\mathcal{A}$ and on $\partial\Omega$ in this case.