Critical points of non-regular integral functionals (Q1989534)

The authors prove the existence of a bounded positive critical point for a class of functionals such as \[ I(v)=\frac{1}{2}\int_{\Omega}(a(x)+b(x)|v|^{\gamma})|\nabla v|^2-\frac{1}{p}\int_{\Omega} |v|^p, \] where \(\Omega\) is a bounded open set in \(\mathbb{R}^N\), for \(N>2\), \(\gamma,p>0\) are such that \[ 0< \gamma < p-2<\frac{4}{N-2} \] and \(a(x), b(x)\) are measurable and satisfy \(0<\alpha\leq a(x)\leq\beta, \;0\leq b(x)\leq\beta\). The authors consider the case \(\gamma>1\) and \(0<\gamma<1\). In the case \(\gamma>1\), their argument relies on the boundedness of a weak limit of a Palais-Smale sequence, prior to knowing that it is a critical point. In the case \(0<\gamma<1\), the authors approximate the functional by a sequence of functionals with \(C^1\) coefficients in the principal part. The key ingredient is the existence result obtained for \(\gamma>1\), which can be applied to the approximating functionals.