Unstable solutions of the Euler equations of certain variational problems (Q789795)

In this paper the mountain-pass lemma is proved for a class of variational problems which is similar to the one considered in the book of Ladyzhenskaya-Ural'tseva on elliptic equations. In addition to the usual statement of this lemma it can be proved that the second variation at the unstable solution obtained by the lemma is not positive definite. The idea of the proof is to consider the problem with the artificially imposed constraint \[ \| u\|_{H^ 2\!_ q}\leq K \] with \(q>n\), which makes the functional considered more regular. Then one can prove that this constraint does not do any harm if K is chosen large enough.