Positive Radial Solutions for a Class of Semilinear Elliptic Problems Involving Critical Hardy-Sobolev Exponent and Hardy Terms ()
1. Introduction and Main Results
In this paper, we are concerned with the existence of positive radial solutions for the following semilinear elliptic problem with Hardy-Sobolev exponent and Hardy singular terms:
(1.1)
where
is the Hardy-Sobolev critical exponent and
is the Sobolev critical exponent,
.
denotes the space of the functions
such that
, endowed with scalar product and norm, respectively, given by
that coincides with the completion of
with respect to the L2-norm of the gradient. By Hardy inequality [1] , we easily derive that the norm is equivalent to the usual norm:
in
.
Clearly,
is a closed subset of
, so
is a Hilbert space. By the symmetric criticality principle, in view of [2] , we know that the positive radial solutions of problem (1.1) correspond to the nonzero critical points of the functional
defined by
where
.
The reason why we investigate (1.1) is the presence of the Hardy-Sobolev exponent, the unbounded domain
and the so-called inverse square potential in the linear part, which cause the loss of compactness of embedding
,
and
. Hence, we face a type of triple loss of compactness whose interacting with each other will result in some new difficulties. In last two decades, loss of compactness leads to many interesting existence and nonexistence phenomena for elliptic equations. There are abundant results about this class of problems. For example, by using the concentration compactness principle, the strong maximum principle and the Mountain Pass lemma, Li et al. [3] had obtained the existence of positive solutions for singular elliptic equations with mixed Dirichlet-Neumann boundary conditions involving Sobolev-Hardy critical exponents and Hardy terms. Bouchekif and Messirdi [4] obtained the existence of positive solution to the elliptic problem involving two different critical Hardy-Sobolev exponents at the same pole by variational methods and concentration compactness principle. Lan and Tang [5] have obtained some existence results of (1.1) with
via an abstract perturbation method in critical point theory. There are some other sufficient conditions, we refer the interested readers to ( [6] - [18] ) and the references therein.
In the present paper, we investigate the existence of positive radial solutions of problem (1.1). There are several difficulties in facing this problem by means of variational methods. In addition to the lack of compactness, there are more intrinsic obstructions involving the nature of its critical points. Based on a suitable use of an abstract perturbation method in critical point theory discussed in [5] [13] [14] , we show that the semilinear elliptic problem with Hardy-Sobolev exponent and Hardy singular terms has at least a positive radial solution.
In this paper, we assume that h satisfies one of the following conditions:
(H)
, and
for some
.
(H’)
,
is T-periodic and
The main results read as follows.
Theorem 1 Let (H) hold, and assume that
and
. Then for
small, problem (1.1) has a positive radial solution
.
Remark 1 It is easy to check that the following function
satisfies the conditions of Theorem 1,
Theorem 2 If assumption (H) holds, and suppose that
and
. Then for
small, problem (1.1) has a positive radial solution
.
Remark 2 It is easy to check that the following function
satisfies the conditions of Theorem 2,
Theorem 3 Assume that (H) holds, and suppose
and
Then for
small, problem (1.1) has a positive radial solution
.
Remark 3 It is easy to check that the following function
satisfies the conditions of Theorem 3 for all
and
,
in fact,
and
We can also give the following example for
and
,
in fact, with the help of computers, we can get
and
Theorem 4 Suppose that assumption (H’) holds, and satisfies the condition that
. Then problem (1.1) has a positive radial solution
, provided
.
Remark 4 It is easy to check that the following function
satisfies the conditions of Theorem 4,
in fact,
and by a direct computation, we have
Theorem 5 Let h satisfy (H’), and suppose that
and
. Then problem (1.1) has a positive radial solution
, provided
.
Remark 5 It is easy to check that the following function
satisfies the conditions of Theorem 5,
This paper is organized as follows. After a first section we devoted to studying
the unperturbed problem
. The main results are proved
in Section 3. In the following discussion, we denote various positive constants as
C or
for convenience.
denote
as
.
This idea is essentially introduced in [5] [13] .
2. The Case
In this section, we will study the unperturbed problem
(2.1)
It is well-known that the nontrivial solutions of problem (2.1) are equivalent to the nonzero critical points of the energy functional
Obviously, the energy functional
is well-defined and is of
with derivatives given by
For all
, it is well known that the function
solves the equation (2.1) and satisfies
Let
then
has a (non-compact) 1-dimensional critical manifold given by
The unperturbed problem is invariant under the transformation that
transforms the function
in the function
. The purpose of this
section is to show the following lemmas.
Lemma 2.1. For all
,
.
Proof. We will prove the lemma by taking
, hence
. The case of a general
will follow immediately. It is always true that
. We will show the converse, i.e., that if
, namely
is a solution of
(2.2)
then
, namely
such that
, where
denotes the
derivatives with respect to the parameter
. We look for solutions
of problem (2.2). One has

and then a first solution is given by

which belongs to
, where
. If we
look for a second independent solution of the form
, we will check that u is not in
. A direct computation gives
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and because
is a solution, we have
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Setting
, we obtain
![]()
namely
![]()
where C is a constant. This implies
as well as
![]()
as
. Since
, we have
. This implies a contradiction to assumption which had been made. So
.
This completes the proof of Lemma. ,
Lemma 2.2. For all
,
is a Fredholm operator with index zero.
Proof. Indeed,
is a Hilbert space, this implies
and
, we have
![]()
![]()
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It is obviously that
is a self-adjoint operator on
, we have
, hence
![]()
Moreover, fox fixed
, the map
![]()
is a bounded linear functional in
, where
. So by the Riesz representation theorem, there is an element in
, denote it by
, such that
(2.3)
Clearly
is linear symmetric and bounded. Moreover T is compact; indeed, let
be a bounded sequence in
. Passing to a subsequence we may assume that
in
,
in
. Use u replaced by
and v by
in (2.3), and apply Hölder’s inequality with
to get
![]()
![]()
which implies that
in
. This shows that T is compact. We have
![]()
So
, where I is an identical operator. By the fact that
is a Fredholm operator with index zero, where
and T is compact, we obtain that
is a Fredholm operator with index zero. This completes the proof of Lemma. ,
Now, we give the abstract perturbation method, which is crucial in our proof of the main results of this paper.
Lemma 2.3. [13] (Abstract Perturbation Method) Let E be a Hilbert space and let
be given. Consider the perturbed functional
.
Suppose that
satisfies:
1)
has a finite dimensional manifold of critical points Z, let
, for all
;
2) for all
,
is a Fredholm operator with index zero;
3) for all
,
.
Hereafter we denote by
the functional
.
Let
satisfy (1)-(3) above and suppose that there exists a critical point
of
such that one of the following conditions hold:
1)
is nondegenerated;
2)
is a proper local minimum or maximum;
3)
is isolated and the local topological degree of
at
,
is different from zero. Then for
small enough, the functional
has a critical point
such that
, as
.
Remark 2.4. [13] If
is compact, then one can still prove that
has a critical point near
. The set
could also consist of local minima and the same for maxima.
3. Proof of the Theorems
We will now solve the bifurcation equation. In order to do this, let us define the reduced functional, see [14] ,
![]()
![]()
where
and verifies
as
. Hence we are led to study the finite-dimensional functional
![]()
The functional
can be extended by continuity to
by setting
![]()
Here we will prove the existence result by showing that problem (1.1) has a positive radial solution provided that h satisfies some integrability conditions. Before giving the proof of the main results, we need the following lemma.
Lemma 3.1. If (H) holds, then
as
.
Proof. From the definition of
and U, we have
![]()
![]()
where
. It is easy to get the first integral in the right hand side; next we show the second integral: In fact,
![]()
so we have
![]()
we deduce that
as
.
Proof of Theorem 1. Firstly, we claim that
is not identically equal to 0. To prove this claim we will use Fourier analysis. We introduce some notation
that will be used in the following discussion. If
, we define
![]()
M is nothing but the Mellin transform. The associated convolution is defined by
![]()
From the definition, it follows that
. Indeed,
![]()
![]()
With this notation we can write our
in the form
![]()
We set
and
![]()
Note that
. We have
and hence
if, by contradiction,
then
and one has
![]()
On the other hand,
is real analytic and so has a discrete number of zeros. By continuity it follows that
. Then g and hence h are identically equal to 0. We arrive at a contradiction. This proves the claim. Since
,
as
, and
, it follows that
has a maximum or a minimum at some
. By a straight application of Lemma 2.3 jointly with Remark 2.4, the result follows. ,
Proof of Theorem 2. Using Lemma 3.1, we have
as
. and
can be extended to
by continuity setting
, where
From the assumption, we have
![]()
and the condition
implies that
has a (global) maximum (if
) or a (global) minimum (if
), at some
. This allows us to use the abstract results, yielding a radial solution of problem (1.1), for
small. ,
Proof of Theorem 3. It suffices to remark that
![]()
If
![]()
![]()
then
(resp.
) and, once more
has a (global) maximum (resp. a (global) minimum ) at some
. ,
In the rest of the section we will give the proof of Theorem 4 and Theorem 5. First we give the following Lemma. Hypothesis (H’) allows us to use the following Riemann-Lebesgue convergence result.
Lemma 3.2 [13] Let
be a cube in
, and
be a T-periodic function. Consider
, then
![]()
Lemma 3.3 If (H’) holds, then
![]()
Proof. Given
, there exists
large enough such that
![]()
On the other hand, the remainder integral over the interval
tends to 0 as
because of hypothesis (H’) and the Riemann-Lebesgue lemma. ,
Proof of Theorem 4. Using Lemma 3.3, we have
as
. and
can be extended to
by continuity setting
, where
. From the assumption, we have
![]()
and the condition
implies that
has a (global) maximum (if
) or a (global) minimum (if
), at some
. This allows us to use the abstract results, yielding a radial solution of problem (1.1), for
small. ,
Proof of Theorem 5. It suffices to repeat the arguments used to prove Theorem 1 using Lemma 3.1 instead of Lemma 3.3.
4. Conclusion
We study a class of semilinear elliptic problems involving critical Hardy-Sobolev exponent and Hardy terms, and obtain positive radial solutions for these problems via an abstract perturbation method in critical point theory. Extensions of nonradial solutions for these problems are being investigated by the author. Results will be submitted for publication in the near future.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank the editor and the referee for their valuable comments which have led to an improvement of the presentation of this paper.
Fund
This work is supported by Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 11671331); Natural Science Foundation of Fujian Province (No. 2015J01585) and Scientific Research Foundation of Jimei University.