Existence of nontrivial solutions of partial differential equations with discontinuous nonlinearities (Q3978488)

The author studies the existence of nontrivial solutions of the boundary value problem of the form \[ -\Delta u\in[\underline g(u),\overline g(u)]\hbox { in } \Omega,\quad u\mid_{\partial \Omega}=0,\tag{1} \] where \(\overline g(t)=\max\{\lim_{s\to t-0}g(s),\lim_{s\to t+0}g(s)\}\), \(\underline g(t)=\min\{\lim_{s\to t-0}g(s), \lim_{s\to t+0}g(s)\}\). \(g:\mathbb{R}\to\mathbb{R}\) is piecewise continuous on any bounded closed interval and \(g(0)=0\), \(g(t)/t\) crosses finitely many eigenvalues of \(-\Delta\) as \(t\) varies from \(-\infty\) to \(+\infty\), \(\Omega\subset R^ n\) is a bounded domain with boundary \(\partial\Omega\). By using the generalized gradients for locally Lipschitz functions on Banach spaces, the author proves that the problem (1) has nontrivial solutions as \(g\) satisfies some condition.