In this paper, by the moving spheres method, Caffarelli-Silvestre extension formula and blow-up analysis, we study the local behaviour of nonnegative solutions to fractional elliptic equations

\begin{align*} (-\Delta)^{\alpha} u =f(u),~~ x\in \Omega\backslash \Gamma, \end{align*}

$0<\alpha <1$

$\Omega = \mathbb {R}^{N}$

$\Omega$

$\Gamma$

$\Omega$

$f(t)$

$t\in [0,\,\infty )$

$f(t)/t^{({N+2\alpha })/({N-2\alpha })}$

$t$

$t$

$t>0$

\begin{align*} f(u(x))/ u(x)\leq C d(x,\Gamma)^{{-}2\alpha}. \end{align*}

$\Gamma =\{0\}$

In this paper, we define a family of functionals generalizing the Yang–Mills–Higgs functionals on a closed Riemannian manifold. Then we prove the short-time existence of the corresponding gradient flow by a gauge-fixing technique. The lack of a maximum principle for the higher order operator brings us a lot of inconvenience during the estimates for the Higgs field. We observe that the $L^2$ -bound of the Higgs field is enough for energy estimates in four dimensions and we show that, provided the order of derivatives appearing in the higher order Yang–Mills–Higgs functionals is strictly greater than one, solutions to the gradient flow do not hit any finite-time singularities. As for the Yang–Mills–Higgs k-functional with Higgs self-interaction, we show that, provided $\dim (M)<2(k+1)$ , for every smooth initial data the associated gradient flow admits long-time existence. The proof depends on local $L^2$ -derivative estimates, energy estimates and blow-up analysis.

We are concerned with an elliptic problem which describes a mean field equation of the equilibrium turbulence of vortices with variable intensities. In the first part of the paper, we describe the blow-up picture and highlight the differences from the standard mean field equation as we observe non-quantization phenomenon. In the second part, we discuss the Moser–Trudinger inequality in terms of the blow-up masses and get the existence of solutions in a non-coercive regime by means of a variational argument, which is based on some improved Moser–Trudinger inequalities.