Critical polyharmonic systems and optimal partitions.

We establish the existence of solutions to a weakly-coupled competitive system of polyharmonic equations in R^N which are invariant under a group of conformal diffeomorphisms, and study the behavior of least energy solutions as the coupling parameters tend to $-\infty$. We show that the supports of the limiting profiles of their components are pairwise disjoint smooth domains and solve a nonlinear optimal partition problem of R^N. We give a detailed description of the shape of these domains.