The existence of positive solutions for some nonlinear boundary value problems with linear mixed boundary conditions (Q2566780)

The authors are interested in the study of positive solutions to the equation \[ ( \varphi ( x^{\prime }) ) ^{\prime }+a( t) f( x( t) ) =0, \] where \(\varphi :\mathbb R\to \mathbb{R}\) is an increasing homeomorphism and \(\varphi ( 0) =0,\) \(f\in C( [ 0,\infty ) ,[ 0,\infty ) ) \) and \(a \in C( ( 0,1) ,[ 0,\infty ) ) \) and \( a( t) \) can be singular at \(t=0\) and \(t=1,\) subject to the linear mixed boundary value conditions \[ x( 0) -\beta x^{\prime }( 0) =0,\;x( 1) +\delta x^{\prime }( 1) =0,\; \] with \(\beta ,\;\delta \in \mathbb{R}\), \(\beta \geq 0,\;\delta \geq 0.\) The method used is an application of a fixed-point index theorem in cones. They provide several results depending essentially on the limits \( f_{0}=\lim_{x\to 0}\frac{f(x)}{\varphi (x)}\) and \(f_{\infty }=\lim_{x\to +\infty }\frac{f(x)}{\varphi (x)}.\) Existence of positive solutions for p-Laplacian operators is not new, see for instance [\textit{L. H. Erbe} and \textit{H. Wang}, Proc. Am. Math. Soc. 120, 743--748 (1994; Zbl 0802.34018)], [\textit{J. Wang}, Proc. Am. Math. Soc. 125, 2275--2283 (1997; Zbl 0884.34032)], [\textit{W. Sun} and \textit{W. Ge}, Acta. Math. Sin. 44, 577--580 (2001; Zbl 1024.34016)], [\textit{H. Chen, X. Liu, Y. Guo} and \textit{W. Ge}, Ann. Diff. Equations 19, 256--260 (2003; Zbl 1050.34021)], [\textit{B. Li}, Acta Math. Sci., Ser. A, Chin. Ed. 23, 257--264 (2003; Zbl 1051.34015)], [\textit{Y. Guo} and \textit{W. Ge}, J. Math. Anal. Appl. 286, 491--508 (2003; Zbl 1045.34005)]. The original novelty is that the results obtained concern the cases where \(\varphi :\mathbb R\to \mathbb{R}\) is an increasing homeomorphism. An interesting example closes the paper.