The direct moving sphere for fractional Laplace equation

Abstract: This paper works on the direct method of moving spheres and establishes a Liouville-type theorem for the fractional elliptic equation [ (-\Delta)^{\alpha/2} u =f(u) ~~~~~~ \text{in } \mathbb{R}^{n} ] with general non-linearity. One of the key improvement over the previous work is that we do not require the usual Lipschitz condition. In fact, we only assume the structural condition that $f(t) t^{- \frac{n+\alpha}{n-\alpha}}$ is monotonically decreasing. This differs from the usual approach such as Chen-Li-Li (Adv. Math. 2017), which needed the Lipschitz condition on $f$, or Chen-Li-Zhang (J. Funct. Anal. 2017), which relied on both the structural condition and the monotonicity of $f$. We also use the direct moving spheres method to give an alternative proof for the Liouville-type theorem of the fractional Lane-Emden equation in a half space. Similarly, our proof does not depend on the integral representation of solutions compared to existing ones. The methods developed here should also apply to problems involving more general non-local operators, especially if no equivalent integral equations exist.