Monotone heteroclinic solutions to semilinear PDEs in cylinders and applications

Abstract In this paper we show the existence of strictly monotone heteroclinic type solutions of semilinear elliptic equations in cylinders. The motivation of this construction is twofold: first, it implies the existence of an entire bounded solution of a semilinear equation without critical points which is not one-dimensional. Second, this gives an example of a bounded stationary solution for the 2D Euler equations without stagnation points which is not a shear flow, completing previous results of Hamel and Nadirashvili. The proof uses a minimization technique together with a truncation argument, and a limit procedure.