Radial symmetry and monotonicity for an integral equation

In this paper we study radial symmetry and monotonicity of positive solutions of an integral equation arising from some higher-order semilinear elliptic equations in the whole space R-n. Instead of the usual method of moving planes, we use a new Hardy-Littlewood-Sobolev (HLS) type inequality for the Bessel potentials to establish the radial symmetry and monotonicity results. (C) 2007 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.