Existence of positive solutions for the nonlinear Kirchhoff type equations in \(\mathbb{R}^n\) (Q2009290)

The author considers the nonlinear problem \[ \left\{ \begin{array}{ll} -\left (a+ \lambda \int_{\mathbb{R}^n}|\nabla u|^2dx \right)\Delta u+V(x)u=|u|^{p-1}x, \quad x\in \mathbb{R}^n,\\ u\in H^1(\mathbb{R}^n), \end{array} \right.\tag{1} \] where \(a\), \(\lambda\) are positive constants, \(n \geq 3\), \(1 < p < \max \{ 3, (n+2)/(n-2) \}\) and the potential \(V\) satisfies: \[ 0<\inf_{y\in \mathbb{R}^n}V(y) \leq V(x) \leq \liminf_{|y|\to \infty}V(y)<\infty. \] It is shown that there exists some (small) \(\lambda_0>0\) such that (1) has at least one positive solution for all \(\lambda \in [0,\lambda _0)\); also, if \(n>3\) then there exists \(\lambda_1>0\) so that (1) has only the trivial solution when \(\lambda \geq \lambda_1\). The approach relies on variational arguments combined with a cut-off technique.