Maximum principles and the method of moving planes for a class of degenerate elliptic linear operators
We deal with maximum principles for a class of linear, degenerate elliptic differential operators of the second order. In particular the Weak and Strong Maximum Principles are shown to hold for this class of operators in bounded domains, as well as a Hopf type lemma, under suitable hypothesis on the degeneracy set of the operator. We derive, as consequences of these principles, some generalized maximum principles and an a priori estimate on the solutions of the Dirichlet problem for the linear equation....