International Journal of Mathematics and Mathematical Sciences
Volume 2019 (2019), Article ID 6824502, 10 pages
https://doi.org/10.1155/2019/6824502

Research Article

Multiplicity of Solutions for a Class of Elliptic Problem of -Laplacian Type with a -Gradient Term

Zakariya Chaouai and Soufiane Maatouk

Center of Mathematical Research and Applications of Rabat (CeReMAR), Laboratory of Mathematical Analysis and Applications (LAMA), Department of Mathematics, Faculty of Sciences, Mohammed V University, P.O. Box 1014, Rabat, Morocco

Correspondence should be addressed to Soufiane Maatouk; sf.maatouk@gmail.com

Received 17 November 2018; Accepted 14 January 2019; Published 5 February 2019

Academic Editor: Vladimir V. Mityushev

Copyright © 2019 Zakariya Chaouai and Soufiane Maatouk. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract.

We consider the following problem: where is a bounded set in () with a smooth boundary, , , , and and belong to for some . In this paper, we assume that a.e. in and without sign condition and then we prove the existence of at least two bounded solutions under the condition that and are suitably small. For this purpose, we use the Mountain Pass theorem, on an equivalent problem to with variational structure. Here, the main difficulty is that the nonlinearity term considered does not satisfy Ambrosetti and Rabinowitz condition. The key idea is to replace the former condition by the nonquadraticity condition at infinity.

1. Introduction and Main Result

Let be a bounded set in () with a smooth boundary . In this paper, we are concerned with the following elliptic problem:

where is the -Laplacian operator, , , , and and belong to for some .

In the literature, there are many results concerning the existence, the uniqueness, and the multiplicity of solutions for models like under various assumptions on and . At first, it is important to mention that the sign of plays a crucial role in the problem regarding uniqueness, as well as existence, of bounded solutions. In this setting, we refer to ([1]) for more details. In the coercive case, that is, a.e. in for some , Boccardo, Murat, and Puel ([2–4]) proved the existence of bounded solutions for more general divergence form problems with quadratic growth in the gradient by using the sub and supersolution method. Moreover, Barles and Murat ([5]) and Barles et at. ([6]) have treated the uniqueness question for similar problems. Notice that if we allow a.e. in , then Ferone and Murat ([7, 8]) observed that finding solutions to becomes rather complex without imposing some strong regularity conditions on the data. For the particular case , there had been many contributions ([9–11]). However, for that may vanish only on some parts of , the uniqueness of solutions was left open until the recent paper authored by Arcoya et at. ([12]). This last result was proved for and and under the following condition:

where . For a related uniqueness result see also Arcoya et at. ([13]).

The case where a.e. in , the question of nonuniqueness has been being an open problem given by Sirakov ([14]) and it has received considerable attention by many authors. Moreover, it should be pointed out that the sign of and whether is a function or a constant generate additional difficulties for solving . In this setting, Jeanjean and Sirakov ([1]) showed the existence of two bounded solutions assuming that , , and are in for some and satisfying

where depends only on , and is the optimal constant in Sobolev’s inequality. Here, is allowed to change sign. Shortly after, this result was extended by Coster and Jeanjean ([15]) for is a bounded function such that by using the degree topological method.

Finally, in the case where is allowed to change sign and with a.e. in , Jenajean and Quoirin ([16, Theorem 1.1]) showed the existence of two bounded positive solutions when ; is a positive constant, and and are suitably small.

We would also like to mention that all the above quoted multiplicity results were restricted to the Laplacian operator with quadratic growth in the gradient, i.e. , and for . Moreover, it is interesting to mention that when is allowed to change sign the solutions are positive.

In this work, we prove the multiplicity of bounded solutions for the problem by assuming the following assumption:

Now, we give a brief exposition of the proof of our multiplicity result. At first, without loss of generality, we solve the problem by restricting it to the case is a positive constant. For is a negative constant, we replace by in , then we conclude. Next, we observe that the problems of type do not have a variational formulation due to the presence of the -gradient term. To overcome this difficulty, we perform the Kazdan-Kramer change of variable, that is, . Thus, we obtain the following equivalent problem :

where

and

We mean by bounded weak solutions of the functions satisfying

for any Obviously, if is a solution of , then is a solution of . Hence, the solutions obtained here are not necessarily positive (compare with ([16])).

One of the most fruitful ways to deal with is the variational method, which takes into account that the weak solutions of are critical points in of the -functional

with and .

In this work, to obtain the two critical points for , we use the Mountain Pass Theorem to show one critical point and the standard lower semicontinuity argument to show the other. For the first one, according to the famous paper by Ambrosetti and Rabinowitz ([17]), the most important step is to show that satisfies the Palais-Smale condition at the level (see Definition 3). The fulfillment of this condition relies on the well-known Ambrosetti-Rabinowitz condition (() for short), namely,

Unfortunately, this condition is somewhat restrictive and not being satisfied by many nonlinearities . However, many researches have been made to drop the . We refer, for instance, to [18–22]. Notice that the nonlinearity considered here does not satisfy (). Moreover, since we do not assume any sign condition on , the fulfillment of the Palais-Smale condition turns out more delicate (see, e.g., [16, 23]). To the best of our knowledge, only Jenajean and Quoirin ([16]), recently, proved the Palais-Smale condition under the assumptions changes sign and is positive, and without assuming (). In their proof, for and , the authors based one of the arguments on the positivity of and the explicit determination of a function ;

In our situation, as is allowed to change sign and the analog of their function cannot be computed explicitly, due to our general consideration of and ( and ); hence, their arguments cannot be adapted.

The key point to show the Palais-Smale condition in this paper is to prove that , among other conditions, satisfies the following (see Lemma 7):

The condition is a variant of the well-known nonquadraticity condition at infinity, which was introduced by Costa and Malgalhães ([18]) and is given as follows:

Observe that since , then is weaker than . Moreover, it should be noted that was considered by Furtado and Silva in their recent paper ([21]). Our result follows by using similar arguments.

Concerning the existence of the second critical point handled by the standard lower semicontinuity argument, we look for a local minimum in for the functional . Indeed, we observe that takes positive values in a large sphere, due to its geometrical structure (see Proposition 6), and .

Now we state the main result of this paper.

Theorem 1. Assume that is satisfied. If and are suitably small, then the functional has at least two critical points. Hence, the problem has at least two bounded weak solutions.

The paper is organized as follows. In Section 2 we recall some preliminary results and show that the functional has a geometrical structure. In Section 3 we prove our main result, Theorem 1.

Notation. Through this paper, we use the following notations.

(1)The Lebesgue norm in is denoted by for . The norm in is denoted by . The Hölder conjugate of is denoted by .(2)The spaces and are equipped with Poincaré norm and the dual norm , respectively.(3)We denote by the ball of radius centered at in and its boundary.(4)We denote by any positive constants that are not essential in the arguments and that may vary from one line to another.

2. Preliminaries and Geometry of the Functional

In this section, we recall the standard definitions of Palais-Smale sequence at the level and Palais-Smale condition at the level for and we prove that the functional defined in (6) has a geometrical structure.

Let us define the level at as follows:

where is the set of continuous paths joining and , where is defined in Proposition 6 below.

Definition 2. Let be a Banach space with dual space and is a sequence in . We say that is a Palais-Smale sequence at the level for if

Definition 3. We say that satisfies the Palais-Smale condition at the level if any Palais-Smale sequence at the level for possesses a convergent subsequence.

In order to prove that has a geometrical structure, we need some properties of , which we gather in the following lemma without proof.

Lemma 4.

(1) as , where if and if .(2) as , for all .(3) and as , for all

Lemma 5.

(1)If , then we have

 for all , and for all .(2)If , then we have

 for all , and for all .

Proof. By using Lemma 4(1), there exists such that for all we have

Let . If , then we have

Moreover, simple calculation yields

Now, if , then we have , where Hence,

By combining (14) and (16), (1) holds. To prove the property (2), we use Lemma 4(2) and the same previous argument.

Proposition 6. Assume that holds. If and are suitably small, then the functional has a geometrical structure; that is, satisfies the following properties:

(i)There exists such that for all in , , where .(ii)There exists such that and .

Proof. (i) To prove this lemma we distinguish two cases on . Firstly, if , then by using Lemma 5(2) and Hölder’s inequality, we get

We choose with close to such that , which exists due to the assumption . Obviously, . Thus, by using Sobolev’s embedding we get

Moreover, from the definition of the function in (4), we have

Using Sobolev’s embedding, we get

By the definition of in (6), we deduce that

Now, let in . Then, we have

We take sufficiently large, such that and (which are sufficiently small by hypothesis), then

Secondly, , we choose again as above such that . Then, by using Lemma 5(1) and Sobolev’s embedding, we get

Now, as the first case, we get

Finally, we summarize the two cases and get

(ii) To prove the second property, we show that as . For this, let be a positive function such that . By the definition of in (6), we have

From inequality (19), we get

Moerever, by Lemma 4(3), we get

Thus, we deduce the desired result.

Finally, we stress that since has a geometrical structure, then the existence of a Palais-Smale sequence at the level for is ensured. This can be observed directly from the proof given in ([17]), or alternatively using Ekeland’s variational principle ([24]).

3. Proof of Theorem 1

Recall from introduction that the proof of our main result is divided into two steps as follows. In the first step, we show the existence of the first critical point for the -functional by using the Mountain Pass Theorem due to Ambrosetti-Rabinowitz ([17]). Precisely, we show that the functional satisfies the Palais-Smale condition at the level . In the second step, we show the existence of the second critical point of on (which is a local minimum) by using the lower semicontinuity argument. Moreover, we are going to see that these critical points are not the same. Finally, we show that any solution of problem is bounded.

3.1. First Critical Point: Palais-Smale Condition

In this subsection, we prove that satisfies the Palais-Smale condition at the level . Precisely, we show that any Palais-Smale sequence at the level for is bounded in , and, then, it has a strongly convergent subsequence.

They key point to prove the boundedness of the Palais-Smale sequence at the level in is to show that verifies the nonquadraticity condition at infinity . Indeed, we have the following lemma.

Lemma 7. The function defined in (3) verifies the nonquadraticity condition at infinity .

Proof. To prove , we show that is increasing and unbounded for sufficiently large. We recall that . Then, by simple calculations, we get

where Thus, is increasing for large enough. Moreover, is unbounded. Indeed, by contradiction, if is bounded, then there exists a positive constant such that

In addition, from the definition of and using integration by parts on , we get

By choosing , we obtain

When , we obtain and . Hence, we have a contradiction. As a conclusion, the function verifies .

Lemma 8. Let be a Palais-Smale sequence at the level for in . Then, is bounded in .

Proof. Let be a Palais-Smale sequence at the level for in . We prove by contradiction that is bounded in . We assume that is unbounded in , that is, .
For all integer , we define

We are going to prove that and also is bounded, which is the desired contradiction.
(a) Showing that : We set ; then is bounded in . Hence, there exists a subsequence denoted again such that converges weakly and strongly to in and in for some , respectively. Moreover, also converges to almost everywhere in . Recall that is Sobolev conjugate.
Now, we claim by contradiction that a.e. in .
Since is Palais-Smale type sequence, then we have

Hence,

for all and for some as . We divide both sides of (36) by , to obtain

On the one hand, since converges weakly to in and by the inequality (19), then for large enough the second and the third terms of the right-hand side of (37) are bounded.
On the other hand, if in , then in . Now, we choose such that in and in , with . Since in , then by using Lemma 4(3), we obtain

Hence, by using Fatou’s lemma in (37) we obtain the unbounded term in the left-hand side of (37). Hence, the claim ( a.e. in .)
Since , then there exists such that , for large enough. Moreover, we have

In what follows, we treat only the case . The other case follows with similar arguments. From Lemma 5(2), we have , where . Since , for some and converges strongly to in with , then, we obtain

due to a.e. in By Hölder’s inequality, we get

Hence, by choosing large enough, we deduce that , as
(b) Showing that is bounded: To prove that is bounded, we distinguish two cases: and .
The Case  . Here, we only handle the proof for . The other case follows as in the proof of Proposition 6(i). By the definition of and , we have , which means that

By the definition of in (6), we have

where the function is defined in and . Moreover, from Lemma 5(2), we have

By choosing and as in the proof of Proposition 6(i), we get

By inequality (19) and Sobolev’s embedding, we get

Then, by (43), (45), and (46), we obtain

for all , where is independent of . Thus, is bounded, which contradicts the fact that is unbounded (see (a)).
The Case . Here, we are proceeding the technique inspired by [21]. To this end, we need the following technical lemma.
Lemma 9. Let the nonnegative function defined as

with . Then, we have

(i)(ii)for any positive function    in    and  ,

Proof. Obviously we have (i). To prove (ii), we follow the same approach given in [21] for the case and , which can be immediately generalized for any positive function and . □
Now, we resume the proof of Lemma 8. From Lemma 7, we have , for large enough and some (which will be chosen later). Moreover, if , then from Lemma 4(2), we have for sufficiently small,

Then, by the continuity of , we have for all

Letting , then we have

Let us handle the two terms and , respectively.

By using (51), we get

For the term , we have

By setting , we obtain

By the technical Lemma 9, we have

Then,

We choose such that

which gives

Since converges to almost everywhere in , weakly in , and strongly in for some , then, we have

Hence, is bounded. Therefore, this contradicts the fact that is unbounded (see (a)).
Now, If , then from Lemma 4(1) and the continuity of , we have for all ,

Following the computations as in (52), we find exactly the same terms and . The term is handled as in (55), whereas is handled as follows:

Moreover, since , then by using Sobolev embedding, the rest of the proof is similar to the case . Hence, we have also the contradiction with the fact that is unbounded (see (a)).

To finish the proof of the Palais-Smale condition for , we only need to show the following lemma.

Lemma 10. Any Palais-Smale sequence at the level of has a strongly convergent subsequence.

Proof. Let be a Palais-Smale sequence at the level and then in , which means that

By Lemma 8, is bounded in . Hence, converges weakly to in and strongly in for some . Therefore,

We know that the operator is a homeomorphism ( [25]). Hence, from (65) we get

Therefore, by the uniqueness of the limit we have

3.2. Second Critical Point

In this subsection, we use the geometrical structure of (see Proposition 6) and the standard lower semicontinuity argument; we show the existence of the second critical point. We state the result as follows.

Theorem 11. Assume that and are suitably small to ensure Proposition 6. Then, the functional possesses a critical point with .

Proof. Since , then . Moreover, if , then we obtain that . Indeed, we choose a positive function that satisfies and . From the definition of in (6), we have for

If , then from Lemma 4(2), we have as . If , obviously, we have as . In addition, in both cases, we have as . Hence, by using these limits, we get from (68) that for small enough.
Now, we set . Then, by Proposition 6(i), we have for . Moreover, there exists a sequence such that converges to . Since is bounded in , then there exists a subsequence denoted again such that converges to weakly in and strongly in for some respectively. Hence, we get

In addition, since , then . Hence, we conclude that is a local minimum of in .

Remark 12. By Section 3.1, has a critical point at the level ; that is, there exists in such that and . Since , where is the second critical point given in the previous theorem, then is different from . Hence, we have two distinct solutions for the problem .

3.3. Boundedness of Solutions

Now, to finish the proof of our main result, it remains to show the boundedness of the solutions. Therefore, we show the following result.

Proposition 13. Any solution of the problem belongs to .

Proof. If , it is over. Otherwise, we begin by writing the problem as follows:

where

Then, by Theorem 2.4 in [26], we can deduce the boundedness of if we show that belongs to , for some . Indeed, from (19) and Lemma 5, we obtain

Let and its conjugate. By using Hölder’s inequality in (72), we obtain

By choosing , we have

Hence, the terms , , and are finite (recall that for some ).

Data Availability

This work is concerned with mathematical analysis, especially, the study of the existence of a multiplicity of solutions. Thus, we have no data or experimental experience.

Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare that they have no conflicts of interest.

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to express their gratitude for the assistance and the encouragement provided by their Ph.D. supervisor Professor Abderrahmane EL HACHIMI. They are also grateful for their colleague Dr. Aymane EL FARDI for the revision and the valuable suggestions for improving the presentation of the paper.

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