Heteroclinic solutions of boundary-value problems on the real line involving general nonlinear differential operators. (Q417009)

The authors consider the BVPNEWLINENEWLINE \((a(x(t))\Phi (x'(t)))'=f(t,x(t),x'(t))\) for a.e. \(t\in \mathbb {R}\), NEWLINE\[NEWLINEx(-\infty )=\nu ^{-}, \;x(\infty )=\nu ^{+} \text{ with } \nu ^{-}<\nu ^{+},NEWLINE\]NEWLINE where \(\Phi \:{\mathbb R}\to \mathbb {R}\) is an increasing homeomorphism with \(\Phi (0)=0\) (this is a generalization of the classical \(p\)-Laplacian) and \(a\) is a positive continuous function. Existence results are established which emphasize how the solvability of the BVP depends on the relative behavior of \(y\mapsto f(t,x,y)\) and \(y\mapsto \Phi (y)\) as \(y\to 0\), and of \(t\mapsto f(t,x,y)\) as \(| t| \to \infty \), and it is not influenced by the dependence on \(x\) of the differential operator and of the right hand side. The sufficient conditions for the solvability of the BVP are rather sharp and cannot be improved in a certain sense. The proofs are based on the method of lower and upper solutions suitably combined to fixed-point techniques to obtain existence results in compact intervals. Then the existence in the whole real line is achieved by the sequential approach, where a sequence of solutions in compact intervals is shown to converge to a desired solution.