Clustering phenomena in low dimensions for a boundary Yamabe problem

Abstract

We consider the classical geometric problem of prescribing the scalar and boundary mean curvatures via conformal deformation of the metric on a $n-$dimensional compact Riemannian manifold. We deal with the case of negative scalar curvature and positive boundary mean curvature. It is known that if $n=3$ all the blow-up points are isolated and simple. In this work we prove that, for a linear perturbation, this is not true anymore in low dimensions $4\leq n\leq 7$. In particular, we construct a solution with a clustering blow-up boundary point (i.e. non-isolated), which is non-umbilic and is a local minimizer of the norm of the trace-free second fundamental form of the boundary.