Linking solutions for quasilinear equations at critical growth involving the ``1-Laplace'' operator (Q1047937)

Let \(\Omega\) be a bounded domain in \({\mathbb R}^n\) (\(n\geq 2\)) with Lipschitz boundary. Assume that \(\lambda\) is a real parameter and \(1^*=n/(n-1)\) denotes the critical Sobolev exponent for the embedding \(W^{1,1}_0(\Omega)\subset L^q(\Omega)\). In this paper the authors are interested in the existence of nontrivial solutions \(u\in BV(\Omega)\cap L^\infty (\Omega)\) to the nonlinear equation with critical growth \[ -{\mathrm d}{\mathrm i}{\mathrm v}\,\left(\frac{\nabla u}{|\nabla u|}\right)=\lambda\,\frac{u}{|u|}+u^{1^*-2}u\qquad{\mathrm i}{\mathrm n}\;\Omega\,, \] under the Dirichlet boundary condition \(u=0\) on \(\partial\Omega\). The main result of the present paper establishes that the above considered problem has a nontrivial solution provided that \(\lambda\geq\lambda_1\). The proof relies on powerful techniques on nonsmooth critical point theory, including linking arguments. These methods can be applied for the qualitative analysis of large classes of degenerate equations in \(BV(\Omega)\).