Compactness and existence results for quasilinear elliptic problems with singular or vanishing potentials

TL;DR

This paper establishes existence and compactness results for solutions to a class of quasilinear elliptic equations with singular or vanishing potentials, using variational methods and analyzing embedding properties of associated function spaces.

Contribution

It introduces new compactness criteria for embeddings in variable potential settings without compatibility restrictions, extending the theory for quasilinear elliptic problems.

Findings

Existence of nonnegative solutions under broad potential conditions

Compactness of embeddings into sum of Lebesgue spaces established

Results applicable to nonlinearities with double-power growth

Abstract

Given $N\geq 3$, $1<p<N$, two measurable functions $V\left(r \right)\geq 0$, $K\left(r\right)> 0$ and a continuous function $A(r) >0$ ($r>0$), we study the quasilinear elliptic equation \[ -\mathrm{div}\left(A(|x| )|\nabla u|^{p-2} \nabla u\right) u+V\left( \left| x\right| \right) |u|^{p-2}u= K(|x|) f(u) \quad \text{in }\mathbb{R}^{N}. \] We find existence of nonegative solutions by the application of variational methods, for which we have to study the compactness of the embedding of a suitable function space $X$ into the sum of Lebesgue spaces $L_{K}^{q_{1}}+L_{K}^{q_{2}}$, and thus into $L_{K}^{q}$ ($=L_{K}^{q}+L_{K}^{q}$) as a particular case. Our results do not require any compatibility between how the potentials $A$, $V$ and $K$ behave at the origin and at infinity, and essentially rely on power type estimates of the relative growth of $V$ and $K$, not of the potentials separately. The nonlinearity $f$ has a double-power behavior, whose standard example is $f(t) = \min \{ t^{q_1 -1}, t^{q_2 -1} \}$, recovering the usual case of a single-power behavior when $q_1 = q_2$.