Under natural regularity assumptions on the data the powers of regular elliptic boundary value problems (e.b.v.p.) are shown to be higher order regular e.b.v.p.. This result is used in description of the domains of fractional powers of elliptic operators which information is in order important in regularity considerations for solutions of semilinear parabolic equations. Presented approach allows to avoid C∞-smoothness assumption on the data that is typical in many references.

We consider a sequence of multi-bubble solutions $u_k$ of the following fourth order equation$${\Delta }^2{u}_k={\rho }_k\frac{h\left(x\right)e^{u_k}}{{\int }_{\Omega }h{e}^{u_k}}\text{in}\Omega ,u_k=\Delta u_k=0\text{on}\partial \Omega ,(*)$$where $h$ is a $C^{2,\beta }$ positive function, $\Omega$ is a bounded and smooth domain in ${ℝ}^4$, and ${\rho }_k$ is a constant such that ${\rho }_k\le C$. We show that (after extracting a subsequence), ${lim}_{k\to +\infty }{\rho }_k=32{\sigma }_{3}m$ for some positive integer $m\ge 1$, where ${\sigma }_3$ is the area of the unit sphere in ${ℝ}^4$. Furthermore, we obtain the following sharp estimates for ${\rho }_k$:$$\begin{array}{cc}\hfill {\rho }_k-32{\sigma }_{3}m& =c_0\sum _{j=1}^m{ϵ}_{k,j}^2\left(\sum _{l\ne j}\Delta G_4(p_j,p_l)+\Delta R_4(p_j,p_j)+\frac{1}{32{\sigma }_3}\Delta logh\left(p_j\right)\right)\hfill \\ & +o\left(\sum _{j=1}^m{ϵ}_{k,j}^2\right)\hfill \end{array}$$where $c_0\>0$, $log\frac{64}{{ϵ}_{k,j}^4}=\underset{x\in B_{\delta }\left(p_j\right)}{max}{u}_k\left(x\right)-log\left(\underset{\Omega }{\int }h{e}^{u_k}\right)$ and $u_k\to 32{\sigma }_3\sum _{j=1}^m{G}_4(·,p_j)$ in $C_{\mathrm{loc}}^4(\Omega \setminus \{p_1,...,p_m\})$. This yields a bound of solutions as ${\rho }_k$ converges to $32{\sigma }_{3}m$ from below provided that$$\sum _{j=1}^m\left(\sum _{l\ne j}\Delta G_4(p_j,p_l)+\Delta R_4(p_j,p_j)+\frac{1}{32{\sigma }_3}\Delta logh\left(p_j\right)\right)\>0.$$The analytic work of...