Locally coercive nonlinear equations, with applications to some periodic solutions (Q1062005)

The equation \[ (NL)\quad Au=f, \] where \(u\in Y\) is the unknown and \(f\in Y^*\) is a given element is considered. Namely, the setting of the problem is the following: i) \(\{Y,Y^*\}\) is a pair of real Banach spaces in duality. This means that there is a nondegenerate continuous bilinear form \(<\;,\;>\) on \(Y\times Y^*\). Moreover Y is reflexive and separable. ii) There is another pair \(\{V,V^*\}\) of Banach spaces in duality, with V separable such that \(V\subset Y\) and \(V^*\supset Y^*\), with the injections continuous and dense. Moreover, the duality \(<\;,\;>\) on \(V\times V^*\) is compatible with that of \(\{Y,Y^*\}.\) iii) There is a bounded, closed and convex subset K of Y, containing the origin O as an internal point, and weakly sequentially continuous map A of K into \(V^*\), such that \(<v,Av>\geq \beta \geq 0\) for all \(v\in V\cap \hat K\), where \(\hat K\) denotes the set of bounding points of K. Then the main result is the following Theorem. Under the assumptions i), ii), iii), we have \(AK\supset \beta K^ 0\), where \(K^ 0\subset Y^*\) is the polar set of K. In other words, (NL) has a solution \(u\in K\) for every \(f\in \beta K^ 0.\) Another theorem proves under some added assumptions uniqueness of the solution u. In the rest of the paper these theorems are used to prove existence, uniqueness and continuous dependence for periodic solutions to certain nonlinear PDE's.