Local mountain-pass for a class of elliptic problems in \(\mathbb R^N\) involving critical growth (Q5949360)

This paper is concerned with the existence and the concentration behaviour of positive bound state solutions \(u\in C^2({\mathbb R}^N)\cap H^1({\mathbb R}^N)\) of the nonlinear elliptic equation \(-\varepsilon^2\Delta u +V(x)u=f(u)+u^{2^*-1}\) in \({\mathbb R}^N\), where \(\varepsilon >0\), \(N\geq 3\), \(2^*=2N/(N-2)\). The potential \(V\) satisfies \(V\geq\alpha >0\) in \({\mathbb R}^N\) and \(\inf_\Omega V<\min_{\partial\Omega}V\), for some bounded domain \(\Omega \subset {\mathbb R}^N\). The nonlinearity \(f\) is superlinear around the origin and has a subcritical growth at infinity. If the mapping \(f(s)/s\) is increasing on \((0,\infty )\) and \(f\) satisfies the standard Ambrosetti-Rabinowitz technical assumption, then the following holds: there exists \(\varepsilon >0\) such that the above problem has a positive bound state solution \(u_\varepsilon\), provided that \(0<\varepsilon <\varepsilon_0\). Moreover, \(u_\varepsilon\) possesses at most one local maximum \(x_\varepsilon\in\Omega\) such that \(\lim_{\varepsilon\rightarrow 0^+}V(x_\varepsilon )=\inf_\Omega V\). The proof is based on standard variational arguments and uses the Mountain-Pass theorem for finding a critical point of the associated energy functional.