Concentration compactness at the mountain pass level in semilinear elliptic problems (Q733659)

The existence of the solution for the problem \(-\Delta u+ \lambda u = f(x,u) \) in a domain \( D\in\mathbb R^N \) is considered, where \( \lambda \) is at or above the bottom of the spectrum for the Dirichlet Laplacian in \(D\). It is considered the case when the correspondent Sobolev imbedding lacks compactness or when the growth of force term \(f(x,u)\) is larger than a critical magnitude depending on \(N\). Significant difficulties appear in this case, requiring the concentration compactness argument. The paper contains a partial survey of known result in this field. Some new, more general, existence results are given, based on the standard, unconstrained, mountain pass setting.