A note on Palais-Smale condition and coercivity (Q1174378)

It has been observed [the second author, An existence theorem on multiple critical points and its applications in nonlinear P.D.E., in Differential geometry and differential equations, Proc. Symp., Changchun/China 1982, 479-483 (1986); the third author, An introduction to critical point theory (1988)] that, for a \(C^ 1\) function \(\varphi\) bounded from below on a Banach space, the Palais-Smale condition implies coercivity. Our aim in this note is to generalize this result under weaker regularity assumptions and to consider the coercivity of \(| \varphi |\) when \(\varphi\) is not bounded from below. Our main tool is Ekeland's variational principle.