Bifurcation direction and exchange of stability for variational inequalities on nonconvex sets (Q884493)

The paper concerns Crandall-Rabinowitz type bifurcation for abstract variational inequalities on nonconvex sets and with multidimensional bifurcation parameter. They have the form \[ p\in \mathbb{P},\;u\in K:\;\langle F(p,u),\psi\rangle\leq 0\;\forall \psi\in T(K,u), \] where \(p\) is a bifurcation parameter, \(\mathbb{P}\) a normed linear space, \(F:\mathbb{P}\times H\to H\) a \(C^k\)-smooth mapping into a Hilbert space \(H\), \[ \begin{aligned} K&:=\{u\in H:\;g_\alpha(u)\leq 0\;\forall \alpha\in \mathcal{A}\},\\ T(K,u)&:=\{z\in H:\;\exists w_n\in K,\;t_n>0,\;w_n\to u,\;t_n(w_n-u)\to z\}.\end{aligned} \] The authors derive formulae which determine the bifurcation direction and in the case of potential operators the stability of all solutions close to the bifurcation point. As an application a system of two second order ODEs with nonconvex unilateral boundary conditions is studied.