The blow-up of critical anisotropic equations with critical directions (Q533630)

The author studies the behavior of Palais-Smale sequences for variational problems involving an anisotropic version of the \(p\)-Laplacian operator in \(\mathbb R^n\). For \(n\geq2\) consider \(\vec{p} = (p_1, \dots, p_n)\) with \(p_i > 1\), \(i=1, \dots, n\). The anisotropic Laplace operator is defined as \(\Delta_{\vec{p}} u = \sum_{i=1}^n \frac{\partial}{\partial x_i}(|\frac{\partial u}{\partial x_i} |^{p_i-2} \frac{\partial u}{\partial x_i})\). When \(\vec{p}\) is such that \( \sum_{i=1}^n 1/p_i>1\) and \(p_j \leq n/(\sum_{i=1}^n \frac{1}{p_i}-1)\) for all \(j=1,\dots,n\), based on reasons of dilation symmetry, the critical Sobolev exponent is defined by \(p^* = \frac{n}{\sum_{i=1}^n \frac{1}{p_i}-1}\). The author looks at Palais-Smale sequences for problems involving \(\Delta_{\vec{p}}\) in the case when not only the power of the nonlinearity is equal to \(p^*\), but also when \( \max (p_1,\dots,p_n)=p^*\).