Nonlinear perturbations of a periodic elliptic problem with discontinuous nonlinearity in \({\mathbb{R}}^{N}\) (Q662384)

The paper under review deals with the study of positive entire solutions of the semilinear elliptic equation \[ -\Delta u+V(x)u=H(u-\beta)f(u)\qquad\text{in}\;{\mathbb R}^N, \] where \(\beta\) is a positive number, \(V\) is a positive, continuous perturbations of a periodic function, \(H\) is the Heaviside function, and \(f\) is a continuous function with subcritical growth. Under natural assumptions, the main result of this paper establishes the existence of some \(\beta^*>0\) such that the above considered equation has at least one positive solution for all \(\beta\in [0,\beta^* )\). The main difficulty to overcome in the proof is the lack of compactness. This is done by combining clever variational arguments with a careful analysis of the associated energy functional on the Nehari manifold.