Asymmetric positive solutions for a symmetric nonlinear problem in \(\mathbb{R}^N\) (Q1584535)

The authors deal with the symmetric semilinear elliptic problem: \[ \begin{cases} -\Delta u(x)+\lambda u(x)= h(x)u(x)+ (1-\chi_d(x)) f(u(x)),\;u(x)> 0,\;x\in\mathbb{R}^N,\\ \lim_{|x|\to\infty} u(x)= 0,\end{cases} \] where \(\lambda>0\), \(N\geq 2\), \(h: \mathbb{R}^N\to \mathbb{R}\) is a radially symmetric, nonnegative, and bounded function with support in \(B_d= \{x\in \mathbb{R}^N:|x|\leq d\}\), and \(\chi_d(x)\) is the characteristic function of the set \(B_d\). This problem arises in nonlinear optics from the study of the behaviour of optical cylindrical waveguides. Under some growth conditions on \(f\in C^1((0,\infty), \mathbb{R})\), it is proved that if \(\text{essinf}_{B_d}h> 0\) and \(\lambda>\|h\|_\infty\), then there exists at least one asymmetric positive solution. The method is based on the variational structure of the problem in the Sobolev space \(H^1(\mathbb{R}^N)\). The point is to show that the mountain-pass solution is asymmetric.