Multiplicity of solutions for a Dirichlet problem with a singular and a supercritical nonlinearities. (Q364244)

The authors prove the existence of a pair of solutions to the Dirichlet problem \[ \begin{cases} -\text{div}(M(x)\nabla u)=\lambda u^{-\gamma }+u^{p} \text{ in } \Omega ,\\ u>0 \text{ in } \Omega ,\\ u=0 \text{ on }\partial \Omega , \end{cases} \] where \(\Omega \) is a bounded domain in \(\mathbb {R}^{n}\), \(M\) is a symmetric, positive definite, uniformly bounded matrix, \(0<\gamma <1<p<\frac {n+2}{n-2}\) and \(\lambda \) is a positive parameter which should be chosen sufficiently small. This result is obtained by variational methods. The main difficulty is due to the fact that the energy functional \(J\) associated to the problem is not differentiable in the space \(W^{1,2}_{0}(\Omega)\). To overcome this difficulty the authors introduce a family of the regular functionals \(J_{\varepsilon }\) which approximate \(J\) as \(\varepsilon \to 0\) and which admit a local minimizer \(u_{\varepsilon }\) and a mountain-pass-type critical point \(z_{\varepsilon }\). Then they show that \(u_{\varepsilon }\to u^{*}\) and \(z_{\varepsilon }\to z^{*}\) weakly in \(W^{1,2}_{0}(\Omega)\), with weak solutions \(u^{*}\) and \(z^{*}\) to the starting problem. A comparison on the energy levels of the approximating solutions \(u_{\varepsilon }\) and \(z_{\varepsilon }\) leads to the conclusion that \(u^{*}\) and \(z^{*}\) are different. Notice that, differently from what the title seems to suggest, the nonlinearity contains a subcritical and not a supercritical term.