Quasilinear elliptic boundary-value problems on unbounded cylinders and a related mountain-pass lemma (Q1261969)

This paper is concerned with the existence of a weak solution for the quasilinear elliptic Dirichlet boundary-value problem on \(\Omega \subset \mathbb{R}^ n\), \(n \geq 3\), \[ -\nabla \cdot \bigl( | \nabla u |^{p- 2}\nabla u \bigr)+| u |^{p-2}u=f(u) \] with \(2 \leq p<n\) and \(\Omega\) an unbounded cylindrical domain. When \(p=2\) and \(\Omega=\mathbb{R}^ n\), the problem has been extensively studied. This problem is motivated by mathematical physics where certain stationary waves in nonlinear Klein-Gordon or Schrödinger equations can be reduced to this form. The loss of compactness of the Sobolev embeddings on unbounded domains renders variational techniques more delicate. This paper introduces a modified concentration compactness principle by means of which a mountain-pass lemma may be applied to the autonomous case in unbounded cylindrical domains.