Multiplicity of positive solutions of nonlinear Schrödinger equations concentrating at a potential well (Q2347178)

The authors prove an existence result for a nonlinear Schrödinger equation \(-\Delta u+V(\varepsilon x)u=f(u)\), posed in \(\mathbb{R}^{N}\), \( N\geq 3\), under appropriate hypotheses on the potential \(V\) and on the nonlinear source term \(f\). \(V\in C(\mathbb{R}^{N},\mathbb{R})\) satisfies \( \inf_{\mathbb{R}^{N}}V>0\) and is such that, for some bounded open set \( \Omega \subset \mathbb{R}^{N}\), \[ m_{0}=\inf_{\Omega }V<\inf_{\partial \Omega }V. \] The nonlinearity \(f\in C(\mathbb{R},\mathbb{R})\) satisfies \( f(0)=0=\lim_{\xi \rightarrow 0}f(\xi )\xi \). Further, there exists \(p\in (1,\frac{N+2 }{N-2})\) such that \[ \lim_{\xi \rightarrow \infty }\frac{f(\xi )}{\xi ^{p}}=0, \] and \(\xi _{0}\in (0,\infty )\) such that \[ \int_{0}^{\xi _{0}}f(\tau )d\tau >m_{0}\xi _{0}^{2}/2. \] The main result of the paper proves that for \( \varepsilon \) small enough, the above problem has at least \(\mathrm{cupl}(K)+1\) solutions concentrating at \(K\), where \(K=\{x\in \Omega :V(x)=m_{0}\}\) and \( \mathrm{cupl}(K)\) is the cup-length of \(K\) defined by the Alexander-Spanier cohomology. The authors do not impose the Ambrosetti-Rabinowitz superlinearity condition. The construction of the solutions is variational and based on a deformation argument in a suitable neighborhood of expected solutions. The main tools of the proof are indeed existence results concerning critical points linked to the Nehari manifold and Pohozaev's identity applied to a composition of two functions.