Existence of positive solutions for nonlocal and nonvariational elliptic systems (Q5717397)

The authors consider the existence of positive solutions for the elliptic system \[ -\Delta u = f_1(x,u)\| v\| _{\alpha_1}^{p_1},\quad -\Delta v = f_2(x,v)\| u\| _{\alpha_2}^{p_2}\;\text{in}\;\Omega,\quad u=v=0 \;\text{on}\;\partial\Omega. \] Here \(\Omega\) is a bounded domain in \(\mathbb R^N\), \(p_1>0\) and \(1\leq\alpha_1\leq\infty\). The solutions describe steady states for certain parabolic systems with nonlocal source. There are two main results which assert the existence of positive solutions under different hypotheses on \(p_i\), \(\alpha_i\) and \(f_i\). In the first one it is assumed that \(f_i\geq 0\), \(f_i\not\equiv 0\) and \(f_i\) satisfy certain growth restrictions (in particular, \(f_i\) are of subcritical growth in the sense of the Sobolev embeddings). The proof uses a fixed point theorem in \(\mathbb R^K\) in order to obtain Galerkin approximations \((u_K,v_K)\) which are subsequently shown to weakly converge to a positive solution of the problem. In the second result it is assumed that \(f_i\) are nondecreasing and there exist appropriate sub- and supersolutions, \((\underline u, \underline v)\) and \((\overline u, \overline v)\) respectively. Then the usual monotone iteration technique is shown to apply, yielding a solution \((u,v)\) in the order interval \([(\underline u, \underline v), (\overline u, \overline v)]\).