The concentration-compactness principle in the calculus of variations. The locally compact case. I (Q794261)

This paper presents a general method - called concentration-compactness method - for solving certain minimization problems on unbounded domains. This method applies to problems with some form of local compactness. For minimization problems with constraints, sub-additivity inequalities are obtained for the infimum of the problem considered as a function of the value of the constraint. The concentration-compactness method states that ''all minimizing sequences are relatively compact if and only if the sub- additivity inequalities are strict.'' This principle is applied to various examples - rotating stars problem, Choquard-Pekar problem, and nonlinear fields equations.