Existence and regularity of positive solutions to elliptic equations of Schrödinger type

Abstract: We prove the existence of positive solutions with optimal local regularity to homogeneous elliptic equations of Schr\"{o}dinger type, under only a form boundedness assumption on $\sigma \in D'(\Omega)$ and ellipticity assumption on $\mathcal{A}\in L^\infty(\Omega)^{n\times n}$, for an arbitrary open set $\Omega\subseteq \mathbf{R}^n$. We demonstrate that there is a two way correspondence between the form boundedness and the existence of positive solutions to this equation, as well as weak solutions to certain elliptic equations with quadratic nonlinearity in the gradient. As a consequence, we obtain necessary and sufficient conditions for both the form-boundedness (with a sharp upper form bound) and the positivity of the quadratic form of the Schr\"{o}dinger type operator with arbitrary distributional potential $\sigma \in D'(\Omega)$, and give examples clarifying the relationship between these two properties.