Nonlocal fourth-order Kirchhoff systems with variable growth: low and high energy solutions (Q276741)

Under consideration is the problem \[ \begin{aligned} & -M\bigl(\int_{\Omega}\frac{1}{p(x)}|\Delta u|^{p(x)}\,dx\bigr)\Delta (|\Delta u|^{p(x)-2}\Delta u)=F_{u}(x,u,v),\\ & -M\bigl(\int_{\Omega}\frac{1}{q(x)}|\Delta v|^{q(x)}\,dx\bigr)\Delta (|\Delta v|^{p(x)-2}\Delta v)=F_{v}(x,u,v),\\ & u=v=\Delta u=\Delta v \text{ on }\partial \Omega, \quad x\in \Omega, \end{aligned}\eqno{(1)} \] where \(x\in \Omega\subset {\mathbb R}^{n}\) is a bounded domain with smooth boundary and \(M\) is a continuous function. The function \(F\) of class \(C^{1}\) in \(u, v \in {\mathbb R}\) satisfies Caratheodory conditions and some growth conditions. The variational approach is used to prove the existence of a weak solution to the problem (1) which can be naturally defined. The corresponding functional is \(J(u,v)=\tilde{M}(\int_{\Omega}\frac{1}{p(x)}|\Delta u|^{p(x)}\,dx)+ \tilde{M}(\int_{\Omega}\frac{1}{q(x)}|\Delta v|^{q(x)}\,dx)- F(x,u,v)\) (\(\tilde{M}(t)=\int_{0}^{t}M(\tau)\,d\tau\)). The conditions for the existence of infinitely many solutions with high (resp., low) energies are derived and thus it is proven under some conditions also that the problem possesses infinitely many weak solutions \((u_{k},v_{k})\) such that \(J(u_{k},v_{k})\to \infty\). The arguments combine related critical point theory arguments with a careful analysis of the energy levels.