Some remarks on patterns for semilinear Neumann problems

We study semilinear elliptic equations with homogeneous Neumann boundary conditions in bounded domains. A classical result by Casten-Holland and Matano shows that stable nonconstant solutions cannot exist in convex domains, although unstable spatial patterns may still occur. In this paper we investigate rigidity properties of classical solutions without imposing stability assumptions and aim to identify structural conditions on the nonlinearity ensuring that all solutions are constant. We prove that every classical solution of the Neumann problem is constant provided the nonlinearity satisfies a suitable `monotonicity' condition, which includes the cases where the nonlinearity has a fixed sign or changes sign in a controlled way around one of its zeros. This yields a rigidity result depending solely on the structure of the nonlinearity and does not require convexity assumptions on the domain. We also discuss the sharpness of our assumptions by constructing examples of nonlinearities for which nonconstant solutions exist. In particular, inspired by the approach of Lin-Ni-Takagi, we consider exponential-type nonlinearities in dimension N=2, and show that when a parameter crosses a critical threshold, the associated Neumann problem admits nontrivial and nonconstant solutions for sufficiently small diffusion.