Nonautonomous \((p,q)\)-equations with unbalanced growth and competing nonlinearities (Q6188315)

The authors study a parametric nonlinear Dirichlet problem driven by the double phase differential operator and a reaction that has the competing effects of a parametric concave term and of a convex perturbation given by \begin{align*} \begin{cases} -\Delta_p^a u(z)-\Delta_qu(z)=\lambda |u(z)|^{\tau-2}u(z)+f(z,u(z)) &\text{in }\Omega,\\ u=0 &\text{on }\partial \Omega, \end{cases} \end{align*} where \(\Omega\subseteq \mathbb{R}^N\), \(N \geq 3\), is a bounded domain with a Lipschitz boundary \(\partial \Omega\), \(1<\tau<q<p<N\), \(p\geq 2\), \(\lambda>0\), \(\frac{p}{q}<1+\frac{1}{N}\), \(a\in C^{0,1}(\overline{\Omega})\setminus\{0\}\) with \(a(z)\geq 0\) for all \(z \in \overline{\Omega}\), \(\Delta_p^q\) denotes the weighted \(p\)-Laplacian with weight \(a(\cdot)\) and \(f\colon \Omega \times \mathbb{R}\to\mathbb{R}\) is a Carathéodory function which is \((p-1)\)-superlinear. Using variational tools together with truncation as well as comparison techniques and critical groups, the authors show that for all small values of the parameter, the problem has at least three nontrivial bounded solutions.