A counterexample to the Liouville property of some nonlocal problems

Abstract: In this paper, we construct a counterexample to the Liouville property of some nonlocal reaction-diffusion equations of the form$$ \int_{\mathbb{R}^N\setminus K} J(x-y)\,( u(y)-u(x) )\mathrm{d}y+f(u(x))=0, \quad x\in\R^N\setminus K,$$where $K\subset\mathbb{R}^N$ is a bounded compact set, called an "obstacle", and $f$ is a bistable nonlinearity. When $K$ is convex, it is known that solutions ranging in $[0,1]$ and satisfying $u(x)\to1$ as $|x|\to\infty$ must be identically $1$ in the whole space. We construct a nontrivial family of simply connected (non-starshaped) obstacles as well as data $f$ and $J$ for which this property fails.