Semilinear problems with right-hand sides singular at \(u=0\) which change sign (Q2664477)

The authors prove an existence result for nonnegative solutions to a quasilinear problem posed in \(\Omega \) and written as \(-div\ a(x,u,\nabla u)=F(x,u)\), with the homogeneous Dirichlet boundary conditions \( u=0\) on \(\partial \Omega \). Here \(\Omega \) is a bounded and open subset of \( \mathbb{R}^{N}\), \(N\geq 1\), \(a:\Omega \times \mathbb{R}\times \mathbb{R} ^{N}\rightarrow \mathbb{R}^{N}\) is a Caratheodory function which satisfies growth properties implying that the operator \(v\in W_{0}^{1,p}(\Omega )\rightarrow -div\ a(x,v,\nabla v)\in W^{-1,p^{\prime }}(\Omega )\) is pseudo-monotone in the sense of Leray-Lions for some \(p>1\). \(a\) is also monotone in its second variable. The Caratheodory function \(F:\Omega \times \lbrack 0,\infty )\rightarrow \mathbb{R}\cup \{+\infty \}\) satisfies growth conditions and is such that \(F(x,0)\) takes nonnegative values in \(\Omega \). The authors define a nonnegative solution to this problem as a nonnegative function \(u\in L^{p^{\ast }}(\Omega )\), with \(p^{\ast }=\frac{Np}{N-p}\), if \( p < N \), \(p^{\ast }\) is a fixed number in \((1,\infty )\) if \(N=p\), and \(p^{\ast }=+\infty \) if \(p>N\), such that \((u-\delta )^{+}\in W_{0}^{1,p}(\Omega )\) for every \(\delta >0\), \(\varphi \nabla u\in L^{p}(\Omega )\), \( F(x,u)^{+}\varphi ^{p}\in L^{1}(\Omega )\) for every \(\varphi \in W_{0}^{1,p}(\Omega )\cap L^{\infty }(\Omega )\) and \(u\) satisfies the variational formulation \(\int_{\Omega }a(x,u,\nabla u)\cdot \nabla (h(u)\varphi ^{p})dx=\int_{\Omega }F(x,u)h(u)\varphi ^{p}dx\) for every nonnegative \(\varphi \in W_{0}^{1,p}(\Omega )\cap L^{\infty }(\Omega )\) and every \(h\in W^{1,\infty }(0,\infty )\). This variational formulation may be extended to test-functions in the space \(W=\{w\in W^{1,p}(\Omega )\), \( \exists \varphi \in W_{0}^{1,p}(\Omega )\cap L^{\infty }(\Omega )\), \(\varphi \geq 0\) a.e. in \(\Omega \), \(\left\vert w\right\vert \leq \varphi ^{p}\) a.e. in \(\Omega \), \(\frac{\left\vert \nabla w\right\vert }{\varphi ^{p-1}}\chi _{\{\varphi \neq 0\}}\in L^{p}(\Omega )\}\). The main result of the paper proves the existence of a nonnegative solution to the above problem. For the proof, the authors first establish a stability result considering sequences of functions \(F_{n}\) converging in some sense to a function \(F\). The authors prove the existence of a nonnegative solution to the above problem with \(F\) such that the nonnegative solutions \(u_{n}\) associated with the corresponding problems converge in some sense to \(u\). Uniform estimates are then proved on \(u_{n}\), which allow to pass to the limit in the variational formulation The authors also prove a comparison result for solutions \(u_{1}\) and \(u_{2}\) to this problem respectively associated with two functions \(F_{1} \) and \(F_{2}\) satisfying \(F_{1}(x,s)\leq F_{2}(x,s)\) on \([0,\infty )\times \Omega \). The third main result of the paper proves a nonexistence result of a solution to the above problem which takes negative values if \(F\) satisfies \(F(x,s)\geq \frac{\tau }{\left\vert s\right\vert }\) for every \(s\in (-\delta _{0},0)\), for \(\delta _{0},\tau >0\), and growth properties. The paper ends with further results on the set of solutions of the above problem in the case \(N=1\), considering the differential equation \(-w^{\prime \prime }=\frac{ 1}{\left\vert w\right\vert ^{\gamma }}-1\) in \((0,l)\), with the boundary conditions \(w(0)=w(l)=0\). The authors confirm their theoretical results with numerical computations of the solutions.