Existence and multiplicity of solutions for nonlinear elliptic problems with the fractional Laplacian (Q2260538)

In this paper, the authors consider the problem \[ (-\Delta)^{\alpha}u=\lambda f(x,u), \quad x\in\Omega, \] subject to the boundary condition \(u\equiv0\) on \(\partial\Omega\). Here, we have that \(\lambda\in\mathbb{R}\) is a parameter, \(\alpha\in(0,1)\) is a parameter, and \(\Omega\subseteq\mathbb{R}^{N}\) is a bounded domain with smooth boundary. Furthermore, the operator \((-\Delta)^{\alpha}\) is the fractional Laplacian operator. This operator is, in particular, defined in terms of the Fourier transform \(\mathcal{F}\) namely, \[ \mathcal{F}\left((-\Delta)^{\alpha}\varphi\right)(\xi)=|\xi|^{2\alpha}\mathcal{F}(\varphi)(\xi), \] for each \(\alpha\in(0,1)\) and where \(\varphi\;: \;\mathbb{R}^{N}\rightarrow\mathbb{R}\) is a given function. The authors deduce the existence of multiple solutions to this problem by making different growth hypotheses both on the map \(f\) itself as well as on the map \[ F(x,t):=\int_0^t f(x,s)\;ds. \] The techniques utilized to obtain the existence results are variational in nature. The paper is nicely written and should appeal to researchers whose interests intersect the application of fractional calculus techniques to elliptic PDE theory.