Nondegeneracy and stability in the limit of a one-phase singular perturbation problem

Abstract: We study solutions to a one-phase singular perturbation problem that arises in combustion theory and that formally approximates the classical one-phase free boundary problem. We introduce a natural density condition on the transition layers themselves that guarantees that the key nondegeneracy growth property of solutions is satisfied and preserved in the limit. We then apply our result to the problem of classifying global stable solutions of the underlying semilinear problem and we show that those have flat level sets in dimensions $n\leq 4$, provided the density condition is fulfilled. The notion of stability that we use is the one with respect to inner domain deformations and in the process, we derive succinct new formulas for the first and second inner variations of general functionals of the form $I(v) = \int |\nabla v|^2 + \mathcal{F}(v)$ that hold in a Riemannian manifold setting.