Harnack inequalities and quantization properties for the $$n-$$ Liouville equation

Abstract

We consider a quasilinear equation involving the \(n-\)Laplacian and an exponential nonlinearity, a problem that includes the celebrated Liouville equation in the plane as a special case. For a non-compact sequence of solutions it is known that the exponential nonlinearity converges, up to a subsequence, to a sum of Dirac measures. By performing a precise local asymptotic analysis we complete such a result by showing that the corresponding Dirac masses are quantized as multiples of a given one, related to the mass of limiting profiles after rescaling according to the classification result obtained by the first author in Esposito (Ann. Inst. H. Poincaré Anal. Non Linéaire 35(3), 781–801, 2018). A fundamental tool is provided here by some Harnack inequality of “sup+inf" type, a question of independent interest that we prove in the quasilinear context through a new and simple blow-up approach.