Nodal properties and bifurcation from the essential spectrum for a class of nonlinear Sturm-Liouville problems (Q1076207)

We consider the equation (1) \(-u''+w(t)| u|^{\sigma} u=\lambda u\), where \(\sigma >0\) is a constant, \(\lambda >0\) is an eigenvalue parameter, and w is a positive function of class \(C^ 1\) satisfying the key condition (L) w'/w is nondecreasing. For the regular Dirichlet problem on \(J=[a,b]\) we give a complete description of the bifurcation diagram. In particular we show that secondary bifurcation cannot occur. For the singular problem with boundary conditions \(u(a)=0\), \(u\in L^ 2[a,\infty [\) on \(J=[a,\infty [\) the bifurcation diagram is partially described. In particular, under some additional assumptions on the growth of w at infinity we obtain infinitely many continuous solution branches in \(L^ 2\times {\mathbb{R}}\) emanating from the lowest point of the essential spectrum of the linearized problem. The solutions on the n-th branch have exactly n-1 interior zeroes. These results are obtained by studying the behavior of the zeroes of the solution u(\(\cdot,\xi)\) of (1) satisfying \(u(a)=0\), \(u'(a)=\xi\), when the parameter \(\xi >0\) is varied. Moreover, the set of \(\xi\) such that \(u(\cdot,\xi)\in L^ 2\) is studied. In a forthcoming paper these results will be improved and extended using variational methods.