Bubbling phenomenon for semilinear Neumann elliptic equations of critical exponential growth

In the past few decades, much attention has been paid to the bubbling problem for semilinear Neumann elliptic equations with the critical and subcritical polynomial nonlinearity, much less is known if the polynomial nonlinearity is replaced by the exponential nonlinearity. In this paper, we consider the following semilinear Neumann elliptic problem with the Trudinger–Moser exponential growth: {-dΔud+ud=ud(eud2-1)inΩ,∂ud∂ν=0on∂Ω, where d> 0 is a parameter, Ω is a smooth bounded domain in R² , ν is the unit outer normal to ∂Ω . We first prove the existence of a ground state solution to the above equation. If d is sufficiently small, we prove that any ground state solution u_d has at most one maximum point which is located on the boundary of Ω . The key point of the proof lies in proving that the distance between the maximum point P_d and the boundary ∂Ω satisfies d(Pd,∂Ω)≲d when d→ 0 and u_d under suitable scaling transform converges strongly to the ground state solution of the limiting equation -Δw+w=w(ew2-1) . Our proof is based on the energy threshold of cut-off function, the concentration compactness principle for the Trudinger–Moser inequality, regularity theory for elliptic equation and an accurate analysis for the energy of the ground state solution u_d as d→ 0 . Furthermore, by assuming that Ω is a unit disk, we remove the smallness assumption on d and show the maximum point of ground state solution u_d must lie on the boundary of Ω for any d> 0 .