Positive solutions of critical quasilinear elliptic equations in $R \sp N$ (Q4940791)

The authors study the equation \[ -\Delta _p u = \lambda g(x) |u|^{p-2}u + \alpha h(x)|u|^{q-2}u + f(x)|u|^{p^*-2}u \] in \(\mathbb{R}^N\) where \(\Delta _p\) is the \(p\)-Laplacian, \(1<p<N\), \(p^*=\frac {Np}{N-p}\) (the critical Sobolev exponent), \(1<q<p^*\). The parameters \(\lambda \geq \lambda ^+_1\) are considered where \(\lambda ^+_1\) is the principal eigenvalue of the related eigenvalue problem. For such parameters, the corresponding functional is not positive definite and the standard approach based on the Mountain pass theorem (which works for \(\lambda < \lambda ^+_1\)) cannot be used. It is proved that under certain assumptions there exist \(\lambda ^* > \lambda ^+_1\), \(\alpha ^*>0\) such that for any \(\lambda \in [\lambda ^+_1,\lambda ^*)\), \(\alpha \in [0,\alpha ^*)\) there is at least one positive solution.