On a class of intermediate local-nonlocal elliptic problems (Q2403350)

The present paper is devoted to the study of the existence of weak positive solutions \(u \in H_0^1 (\Omega)\) for a class of intermediate local-nonlocal boundary value problems of the following type: \[ -\operatorname{div} \left[ \left( \frac{a}{meas(\Omega(x,r))} \int\limits_{\Omega(x,r)} u(y) dy \right) \nabla u \right] = f(x,u,\nabla u)\tag{1} \] where \(x \in \Omega\), \(\Omega \subset \mathbb{R}^N\), \(N \geq 1\) is a bounded domain, \(r \in \mathbb{R}_+=(0,\infty)\), \(a \in C(\mathbb{R},\mathbb{R}_+)\), \(\Omega(x,r) = \Omega \cap B(x,r)\), \(B(x,r)= \{ y \in \Omega | \;|x-y|<r\}\) and \(| \cdot |\) denotes the Euclidian norm. The approach used by the authors is essentially based on the Galerkin's method and on a variant of the Brouwer fixed point theorem in the form proved by J. L Lions. The main idea of the proof is to solve as first step an auxiliary pseudo-linear (PL) version of the problem (1) when the right side of (1) is \( f(x,u,\nabla u) = f(x)\), where \(f \in H^{-1}(\Omega)\) (\(H^{-1}(\Omega)\) denotes the dual space of \(H_0^1(\Omega)\)). The second step is for a sublinear (SL) auxiliary variant of (1) with the following right side: \( f(x,u,\nabla u) = H(x)(u^+)^\alpha + \frac{K(x)}{(|u| + \epsilon)^\gamma} + L(x) |\nabla u|^\theta\), where \(\alpha , \gamma, \theta \in (0,1)\), \(H,K,L \in L^\infty (\Omega)\), to prove that the problem (SL) has a weak positive solution \(u \in H_0^1 (\Omega)\). Finally, when the same assumptions of the problem (SL) hold, it is proved that the problem (1) has a weak positive solution \(u \in H_0^1 (\Omega)\), too.