 Skew-coupled elliptic system

A skew-coupled elliptic system has zeroth-order couplings with opposite signs. For the displayed example with homogeneous Dirichlet boundary conditions, its weak formulation on $V=H_0^1(\Omega )\times H_0^1(\Omega )$ has the bilinear formThe coupling cancels for equal arguments, so $b((p,q),(p,q))=\Vert \nabla p{\Vert }_0^2+\Vert \nabla q{\Vert }_0^2$. On a domain satisfying the Poincaré inequality, this is a coercive bilinear form. With the product first-order Sobolev norm, the Cauchy-Schwarz inequality applied to $(\nabla p,\nabla q,-q,p)$ and $(\nabla v,\nabla z,v,z)$ gives $|b(P,T)|\le \Vert P{\Vert }_V\Vert T{\Vert }_V$. The Lax-Milgram theorem therefore applies even though the bilinear form is not symmetric. Eliminating $w=-\Delta u$ recovers ${\Delta }^{2}u+u=f$, involving the biharmonic operator.