Morse index estimates for continuous functionals associated with quasilinear elliptic equations. (Q5954506)

The paper is devoted to the study of a class of quasilinear elliptic equations. The author establishes a result of Amann-Zehnder type in a general framework. The main novelties of the paper are the non-smoothness of the associated energy functional, and the fact that the origin is a degenerate critical point of this functional. The proof of the main result is based on a generalization of the classical Morse lemma combined with a finiteness result for the critical groups. The approach is based on the notion of weak slope introduced by de Giorgi and some basic results from the critical point theory (for non-smooth functionals) in the sense of Degiovanni.