A strong resonance problem (Q2640202)

The authors study a functional f: \(H\times V\to {\mathbb{R}}\) of the form \(f(x,v)=(Ax,x)+G(x,v)\), where H is a Hilbert space, V is a compact Riemannian manifold and A: \(H\to H\) is a selfadjoint operator with finite dimensional kernel N(A). Because of the behaviour of G on N(A), the Palais-Smale condition is not satisfied by f. Therefore a continuous extension F: N(A)\({}^{\perp}\times \Sigma \times V\to {\mathbb{R}}\) of f is introduced, where \(\Sigma =N(A)\cup \{\infty \}\). It turns out that a suitable deformation lemma is still true for F, so that it is possible to prove that f has at least \(1+cuplength(V)\) critical points. The abstract result is then applied to problems at resonance concerning semilinear elliptic equations and Hamiltonian systems.