Bifurcation results for a class of prescribed mean curvature equations in bounded domains

Abstract Bifurcation for prescribed mean curvature equations in one dimension has been intensively investigated in recent years, and a striking phenomenon discovered is that the length of the interval may affect the shapes of bifurcation curves. However, to our best knowledge, no such results are known in higher dimensions. In this paper, we study a class of prescribed mean curvature equations in bounded domains of R N with general nonlinearities f satisfying f ( 0 ) = 0 and f ′ ( 0 ) > 0 . We establish some formulas for directions of bifurcation at simple eigenvalues, which lead to a sufficient and necessary condition to ensure that the directions depend on the size of the domain. In contrast, this phenomenon does not occur for the semilinear case. Some interesting examples, including logistic and perturbed exponential nonlinearities, are also investigated.