On subsolutions and concavity for fully nonlinear elliptic equations

Abstract

Subsolutions and concavity play critical roles in classical solvability, especially a priori estimates, of fully nonlinear elliptic equations. Our first primary goal in this paper is to explore the possibility to weaken the concavity condition. The second is to clarify relations between weak notions of subsolution introduced by Székelyhidi and the author, respectively, in attempt to treat equations on closed manifolds. More precisely, we show that these weak notions of subsolutions are equivalent for equations defined on convex cones of type 1 in the sense defined by Caffarelli, Nirenberg and Spruck.