Positive solutions of one-dimensional \(p\)-Laplacian equations and applications to population models of one species (Q526121)

The authors study the scalar equation \[ -\Delta_p z(x)= f(x,y(x))\qquad (0<x<1)\tag{\(*\)} \] subject to the Dirichlet boundary condition \(z(0)= z(1)=0\). Even in the scalar case when \(\Delta_p z= (|z'|^{p-2} z')'\), one encounters many difficult problems and phenomena when dealing with the \(p\)-Laplacian (apart from the linear case \(p=2\) which has been studied of course for centuries). Thus, good information is available only for the first eigenvalue \(\mu_p\) of the homogeneous problem, the cases \(p<2\) and \(p>2\) often exhibit a rather different behaviour, and existence of positive weak solutions is more easily obtained than regularity. In general, variational methods or monotonicity methods have turned out to be more useful than topological methods. In this paper, the authors apply topological fixed point index theory for compact operators and obtain existence results for positive strong solutions in the autonomous case \(f=f(u)\). To this end, they impose asymptotic estimates of the form \[ 0\leq\lim_{u\to\infty} \frac{f(u)}{u^{p-1}} < \mu_p < \lim_{u\to 0+} \frac{f(u)}{u^{p-1}}. \] In the last part of the paper, the abstract result is applied to a logistic population model, where the nonlinearity in \((*)\) has the form \(f(u)= u^{\sigma-1}- u^\sigma\) and represents the logistic growth rate of order \(\sigma\leq p\).