Three-term asymptotics for the boundary layers of semilinear elliptic eigenvalue problems

We consider the nonlinear eigenvalue problem −Δu=λ f(u) in Ω u=0 on ∂Ω, where Ω is a ball or an annulus in RN (N ≥ 2) and λ > 0 is a parameter. It is known that if λ >> 1, then the corresponding positive solution uλ develops boundary layers under some conditions on f. We establish the asymptotic formulas for the slope of the boundary layers of uλ with the exact second term and the ‘optimal’ estimate of the third term.