Unilateral global bifurcation for fourth-order problems and its applications (Q1727499)

Summary: We will establish unilateral global bifurcation result for a class of fourth-order problems. Under some natural hypotheses on perturbation function, we show that \((\lambda_k, 0)\) is a bifurcation point of the above problems and there are two distinct unbounded continua, \(C_k^+\) and \(C_k^-\), consisting of the bifurcation branch \(C_k\) from \((\mu_k, 0)\), where \(\mu_k\) is the \(k\)th eigenvalue of the linear problem corresponding to the above problems. As the applications of the above result, we study the existence of nodal solutions for the following problems: \(x''' + k x'' + l x = r h(t) f(x)\), \(0 < t < 1\), \(x(0) = x(1) = x'(0) = x'(1) = 0\), where \(r \in \mathbb{R}\) is a parameter and \(k, l\) are given constants; \(h(t) \in C([0,1], [0, \infty))\) with \(h(t) \not\equiv 0\) on any subinterval of \([0,1]\); and \(f : \mathbb{R} \to \mathbb{R}\) is continuous with \(s f(s) > 0\) for \(s \neq 0 \). We give the intervals for the parameter \(r \neq 0\) which ensure the existence of nodal solutions for the above fourth-order Dirichlet problems if \(f_0 \in [0, \infty]\) or \(f_{\infty} \in [0, \infty],\) where \(f_0 = \lim_{| s | \to 0} f(s) / s\) and \(f_{\infty} = \lim_{| s | \to + \infty} f(s) / s \). We use unilateral global bifurcation techniques and the approximation of connected components to prove our main results.