Large solutions of elliptic equations with a weakly superlinear nonlinearity

This paper studies the asymptotic behavior near the boundary for large solutions of the semilinear equation Δu + au = b(x)f(u) in a smooth bounded domain Ω of ℝ^N with N ≥ 2, where a is a real parameter and b is a nonnegative smooth function on Ω̄. We assume that f(u) behaves like u(ln u)^α as u → ∞, for some α > 2. It turns out that this case is more difficult to handle than those where f(u) grows like u ^p (p > 1) or faster at infinity. Under suitable conditions on the weight function b(x), which may vanish on ∂Ω, we obtain the first order expansion of the large solutions near the boundary. We also obtain some uniqueness results.