Heteroclinics for non-autonomous second-order differential equations (Q637045)

The paper deals with the second order ordinary non-autonomous differential equation \[ \ddot u=a(t)f(u), \tag{1} \] where \(a\in L^\infty (\mathbb {R},\mathbb {R})\) satisfies \(0<a_1\leq a(t)\leq a_2\) for a.e. \(t\in \mathbb {R}\) and for some positive constants \(a_1, a_2\), and \(f(\pm 1)=0\). Further, \(f=F'\), where \(F\in C^1(\mathbb {R},\mathbb {R})\) is non-negative, satisfies \(F(-1)=F(1)=0\) and \(F>0\) in \((-1,1)\). The case that \(F\) has only one critical point \(0\) in \((-1,1)\) is considered, that is \[ uf(u)<0 \quad \hbox {if}\;0\not = u\in (-1,1). \] First, the authors introduce Dirichlet boundary conditions in bounded intervals \([-T,T]\) \[ u(-T)=-1,\quad u(T)=1, \tag{2} \] and for all \(T\) sufficiently large, they prove the existence of three solutions to problem (1), (2) provided \( \lim _{| t| \to \infty }a(t)=a_1,\) \(a(t)>a_1,\) a.e. on some neighborhood of zero. Then, they consider \(T\to \infty \) and get the existence of heteroclinics of (1) connecting \(\pm 1\). An asymptotically asymmetric case, where \( | \lim _{t\to -\infty }a(t)-\lim _{t\to \infty }a(t)| \) is a sufficiently small positive number, is studied, as well. Variational methods are used in the proofs.