Exponential decay for the solutions of nonlinear elliptic systems posed in unbounded cylinders

We study the asymptotic behavior at infinity of the solutions of a nonlinear elliptic system posed in a cylinder of infinite length. The problem is written in a variational formulation, where we ask the derivative of the solutions to be in Lp. We show that an exponential decay at infinity for the second member implies exponential decay for the derivative of the solutions. We also give an application of this result to the study of boundary layers problems. © 2006 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved