Some abstract critical point theorems and applications (Q2380893)

The compactness condition known as the \textit{Palais-Smale condition} plays a crucial role in many important critical point results, including the mountain-pass theorem of Ambrosetti-Rabinowitz. This condition was weakened by Cerami and several applications of the new compactness condition have been found in the last few years. The main purpose of this paper is to introduce a weaker version of the Palais-Smale and Cerami conditions. This condition is called \((wC^*)\) in the present paper and several related abstract results are proven, including deformation and intersection lemmatas. Some applications to Leray-Lions operators are provided in the last section of this paper.