Prescribing curvatures in the disk via conformal changes of the metric: The case of negative Gaussian curvature

Abstract

This paper deals with the question of prescribing the Gaussian curvature on a disk and the geodesic curvature of its boundary by means of a conformal deformation of the metric. We restrict ourselves to a symmetric setting in which the Gaussian curvature is negative, and we are able to give general existence results. Our approach is variational, and solutions will be searched as critical points of an associated functional. The proofs use a perturbation argument via the monotonicity trick of Struwe, together with a blow-up analysis and Morse index estimates. We also give a nonexistence result that shows that, to some extent, the assumptions required for existence are necessary.