Existence and nonexistence results for a class of nonlinear, singular Sturm-Liouville equations (Q5954475)

The authors study the differential equation \[ -(\omega(x)u')'=f(u), \tag{1} \] where \(\omega\) is continuous and nonnegative on \(\mathbb{R}\) and \(f\) is continuous on \(\mathbb{R}\), satisfies suitable growth conditions and has a superlinear behaviour at infinity. The weight \(\omega\) may vanish at some isolated points and \(1/\omega\) is not integrable at the zeros of \(\omega\). They denote \(Z=\omega^{-1}(0)\) and assume that \(Z=\{z_i\}\) is a discrete set of points and \(\omega(x) \sim |x-z_i|^{\alpha_i}\) as \(x\rightarrow z_i\), with \(\alpha_i>1\). In Section 1, the authors exhibit some nonexistence results for equation (1) in a neighborhood \(I\) of a degeneracy point \(z\in Z\). More precisely, they prove that (1) admits no positive classical supersolution on \(I\). Here, a classical supersolution on \(I\) is understood as a function \(u\in C^2(I)\) satisfying \( -(\omega(x)u')'\geq f(u).\) The second nonexistence result which is proved in the paper concerns a weaker notion of supersolution - a distributional supersolution. In Section 2, using variational methods, they investigate the boundedness and, possibly, the continuity of solutions to (1) in a neighborhood of a degeneracy point \(z\in Z\). In Section 3, they study the existence of variational solutions to (1) on an unbounded component of \(\mathbb{R}\setminus Z\). The existence is proved via the mountain-pass lemma. In Section 4, the authors prove the existence of a nontrivial variational solution on a bounded component of \(\mathbb{R}\setminus Z\). In this case, the solution is forced to change sign, and it is found by using a standard linking theorem. In Section 5, a theorem concerning the existence of a global solution to (1) is stated.