Multibump solutions for a class of nonlinear elliptic problems (Q1389894)

The authors study a problem of the form \[ \text{div}(a_\varepsilon(x)Du)+ g(x,u)= 0\quad\text{in }\Omega,\quad u= 0\quad\text{on }\partial\Omega, \] where \(\Omega\) is a bounded domain of \(\mathbb{R}^N\) and \(g\) behaves like \(t^{p-1}\) as \(t\downarrow 0\), with \(2< p<2N/(N- 2)\) if \(N\geq 3\). Here, \(a_\varepsilon(x)= a^{ij}_\varepsilon(x)\) is a positive definite symmetric \(N\times N\) matrix and \(a^{ij}_\varepsilon\in L^\infty(\Omega,\mathbb{R})\), but \(a_\varepsilon(x)\) degenerates as \(\varepsilon\to 0\) in a subset of \(\Omega\). They then show that if the degeneration set consists of \(k\) connected components there exist at least \(2^k-1\) positive multibump solutions.