Ordinary \(p\)-Laplacian systems with nonlinear boundary conditions (Q819648)

The authors consider the following nonlinear boundary value problem \[ -(| u^{\prime }| ^{p-2}u^{\prime })^{\prime }+\varepsilon | u| ^{p-2}u=\nabla F(t,u) \quad \text{for }t\in [ 0,T], \] \[ ((| u^{\prime }| ^{p-2}u^{\prime }) (0),(| u^{\prime }| ^{p-2}u^{\prime })(T)) \in \partial j(u(0),u(T)), \] where \(\varepsilon \geq 0,\) \(p\in (1,\infty )\) are fixed, \(j: \mathbb{R}^{N}\times \mathbb{R}^{N} \rightarrow (-\infty ,+\infty)\) is a proper convex and lower semicontinuous functional and \(F:[0,T]\times \mathbb{R}^{N} \rightarrow \mathbb{R}\) is a Carathéodory mapping, continuously differentiable with respect to the second variable. The approach adopted here is a variational method based on \textit{A. Szulkin}'s critical point theory [Ann. Inst. Henri Poincaré, Anal. Non Linéaire 3, 77--109 (1986; Zbl 0612.58011)]. They obtain existence results in the coercive case as well as when the corresponding functional has a mountain pass geometry.