Some results on critical groups for a class of functionals defined on Sobolev Banach spaces (Q2568675)

The authors study the functional \[ f:W_0^{1,p}(\Omega)\to {\mathbb R} \] \[ f(u)={1\over p} \int_\Omega |\nabla u|^p\,dx + {1\over 2}\int_\Omega |\nabla u|^2\,dx + \int_\Omega G(u)\, dx, \] where \(\Omega\) is a bounded domain of \({\mathbb R}^N\) with sufficiently regular boundary, and where \(G\) satisfies certain growth conditions. The aim of this article is to adapt techniques from Morse theory on Hilbert spaces to the Banach space \(W_0^{1,p}(\Omega)\). One important ingredient in the Morse theory is the calculation of critical groups. These are the relative Alexander-Spanier cohomology groups with respect to different levels of the Morse function. The authors calculate these groups in this Banach space setting for an isolated critical point \(u\) of \(f\) such that \(f''(u)\) is injective. The presentation of this short article concentrates on the essential ideas, and contains several good references to background material and more detailed literature.