Critical quasilinear equations on Riemannian manifolds

Abstract: In this paper, we investigate critical quasilinear elliptic partial differential equations on a complete Riemannian manifold with nonnegative Ricci curvature. By exploiting a new and sharp nonlinear Kato inequality and establishing some Cheng-Yau type gradient estimates for positive solutions, we classify positive solutions to the critical $p$-Laplace equation and show rigidity concerning the ambient manifold. Our results extend and improve some previous conclusions in the literature. Similar results are obtained for solutions to the quasilinear Liouville equation involving the $n$-Laplace operator, where $n$ corresponds to the dimension of the ambient manifold.