Solutions of Schrödinger equations with inverse square potential and critical nonlinearity (Q439106)

The paper under review deals with the qualitative analysis of a class of nonlinear stationary Schrödinger equations with inverse square potential and critical Sobolev exponent. The first goal of this paper is to provide an analysis of the features of a Palais-Smale sequence for the associated energy functional. In such a case it is employed a blow-up technique to characterize all energy values where the Palais-Smale condition fails. More precisely, there are represented all diverging Palais-Smale sequences as the sum of critical points of a family of limiting functionals which are invariant under scaling. The second purpose in this paper is to obtain positive solutions of the equation under weaker conditions on the potential and the nonlinear term. First, following a strategy developed for the Dirichlet problem, it is showed that the energy functional satisfies the geometrical assumptions of the mountain pass theorem. Then, by means of a blow-up technique, the authors show that the mountain pass level is actually below a compactness threshold. The methods developed in this paper can be applied to other classes of singular PDEs with singular potential.