An existence result for a class of semilinear subelliptic PDE's (Q2569830)

The authors consider semilinear subelliptic Dirichlet problems of the form \[ {\mathcal L}u = \sum_{j=1}^m X_j^*X_ju = a(x)g(u) + f(x) \text{ in } \Omega, \qquad u=u_0 \text{ on }\partial\Omega, \] for \(u_0\) belonging to the anisotropic Sobolev space \(W_X^{1,2}(\Omega)\), where \(X=\{X_1,\dots,X_m\}\) is a system of smooth vector fields satisfying the Hörmander condition. The existence of weak solutions is proved for a wide class of domains \(\Omega\subset{\mathbb R}^n\) (the so-called ``weak Boman chain domains'') by using the inverse function theorem. For this result \(a,f,g\) are required to satisfy several conditions; in particular, \(\|f\|_{L^p(\Omega)}\) must be sufficiently small. Related results of independent interest are an embedding theorem for \(W_X^{2,p}(\Omega)\) into \(L^\infty(\Omega)\), where \(p>Q/2\) and \(Q\) is the homogeneous dimension of \({\mathbb R}^n\) with respect to the Carnot-Carathéodory distance induced by \(X\), and a Stampacchia-type estimate \(\sup_\Omega |u| \leq C \|{\mathcal L}u\|_{L^p(\Omega)}\) for \(u\in W_X^{1,p}(\Omega)\) with \(p>Q/2\) and \(u=0\) on \(\partial\Omega\).