Infinitely many solutions for a class of degenerate anisotropic elliptic problems with variable exponent (Q653420)

The author considers the Dirichlet problem for the elliptic equation of divergence form \[ \begin{aligned} -\sum _{i=1}^N \partial _{x_i} a_i(x, \partial _{x_i}u ) = f(x,u)\,\, & \text{in}\,\,\, \Omega ,\\ u=0\,\, & \text{on} \,\,\, \partial \Omega, \end{aligned} \tag{1} \] where \(\Omega \subset {\mathbb R}^N\) \((N\geq 3) \) is a bounded domain with smooth boundary and \(a_i,f:\Omega \times {\mathbb R} \to {\mathbb R}\) are Carathéodory functions. The corresponding functional works on the anisotropic variable exponent Sobolev space \(W^{1, \overrightarrow{p}(\cdot )}(\Omega )\) where \(\overrightarrow{p}\) satisfies the following condition: \[ \overrightarrow{p}(x)=(p_1(x), \ldots ,p_N(x))\tag{p} \] and \(p_i, \,\, ( i \in \{1,2,\ldots ,N\}) \) are continuous functions such that \( 1<p_i(x)<N\) and \(\sum _{i=1}^N 1/\inf _x p_i(x) >1\) for all \( x\). Let us denote \[ A_i(x,s)= \int _0^s a_i(x,t)dt \quad (i\in \{ 1,2,\ldots ,N\}), F(x,s)= \int _0^s f(x,t)dt . \] Moreover, define \(C_+(\overline{\Omega })=\{p \in C(\overline{\Omega });\, \min _{x\in \overline{\Omega }}p(x)>1\}\), and for any \(p_i \in C_+(\overline{\Omega })\) \((i=1,2,\ldots ,N)\), \[ \overrightarrow{P}_+= (p_1^+,\ldots ,p_N^+), \quad \overrightarrow{P}_-=(p_1^-,\dots ,p_N^-)] \] where \(p_i^+= \sup _{x\in \Omega }p_i(x)\) and \( p_i^-=\inf _{x \in \Omega }p_i(x)\) \((i=1,2,\ldots ,N)\). Furthermore define \[ P_+^+= \max \{p_1^+, \ldots ,p_N^+\}, P_-^+=\max \{p_1^-,\ldots , p_N^-\}, P_-^- = \min \{p_1^-,\ldots ,p_N^-\} \] and \[ P_-^*=\frac{N}{\sum _{i=1}^N 1/p_i^- -1}, P_{-,\infty }= \max \{ P_-^+,P_-^*\}. \] The author gets the following result. \textbf{Theorem 1.} Suppose that \(\overrightarrow{p}\) satisfies (p) and, for all \(i\in \{1,\ldots ,N\}\), the functions \(A_i,a_i,f\) fulfill the conditions: (A.1) \(A_i\) is even in \(s\), that is, \(A_i(x,-s)=A_i(x,s)\) for all \(x\in \Omega \); (A.2) there exists a positive constant \(c_{1,i}\) such that \(a_i\) satisfies the growth condition \[ | a_i (x,s) | \leq c_{1,i}(1+ | s | ^{p_i(x)-1}) \] for all \(x\in \Omega \) and \(s\in {\mathbb R}\); (A.3) \(a_i\) is strictly monotone, that is, \[ (a_i(x,s)-a_i(x,t))(s-t) >0 \] for all \(x \in \Omega \) and \(s,t \in {\mathbb R}\) with \(s\neq t\); (A.4) the following inequalities hold: \[ | s | ^{p_i(x)} \leq a_i (x,s)s \leq p_i(x) A_i(x,s) \] for all \(x \in \Omega \) and \(s\in {\mathbb R}\); (f1) \(f\) is odd in \(s\), that is, \(f(x,-s)=-f(x,s)\) for all \(x\in \Omega \); (f2) there exists a positive constant \(c_2\) and \(q \in C(\overline{\Omega })\) with \(1<P_-^- < P_+^+<q^-<q^+ <P_-^*\) such that \(f\) satisfies the growth condition \[ | f(x,s) | \leq c_2 | s | ^{q(x)-1} \] for all \(x \in \Omega \) and \(s \in {\mathbb R}\); (f3) \(f \) verifies the Ambrosetti-Rabinowitz type condition: there exists a constant \(\mu >P_+^+\) such that for every \(x \in \Omega \), \[ 0<\mu F(x,s)\leq sf(x,s)\quad \forall s>0. \] Then the problem (1) admits an unbounded sequence of weak solutions. Here \(u \in W^{1,\overrightarrow{p}(\cdot )}\) is a weak solution of (1) if and only if the following equality holds \[ \int _{\Omega } \left[ \sum _{i=1}^N a_i(x,\partial _{x_i}u)\partial _{x_i} \phi -f(x,u) \phi \right]dx=0 \] for all \(\phi \in W^{1,\overrightarrow{p}(\cdot )}\). This result is an extension of the previous paper by the author, \textit{P. Pucci} and \textit{V. D. Rădulescu} [Complex Var. Elliptic Equ. 56, No. 7--9, 755--767 (2011; Zbl 1229.35086)].