A linear perturbed Palais-Smale condition for lower semicontinuous functions on Banach spaces (Q960611)

Let \(X\) be a Banach space and \(f:X\to \bar{\mathbb R}\) an extended real-valued, lower semicontinuous and bounded from below function. One says that \(f\) satisfies the Palais-Smale (P-S) condition if for every sequence \((x_n)\) in \(X\) such that \(f(x_n)\to \inf f(X),\) the sequence \((x_n)\) converges. This is equivalent to the fulfillment of the following two conditions: (i) there exists \(x_0\in X\) such that \(f(x_0)=\inf f(X)\); and (ii)\; diam \(S(\alpha)\to 0\) as \(\alpha\to 0,\) where, for \(\alpha > 0\), \(S(\alpha)=\{x\in X : f(x)\leq \alpha +\inf f(X)\}\). In the present paper, one considers perturbed variants of the (P-S) condition, defined by the conditions: (i) for every \(\varepsilon > 0\), there exists a Lipschitz function \(h_\varepsilon\) with Lipschitz norm less than \(\varepsilon\) such that \(f+h_\varepsilon\) attains a strong minimum at some point \(x_\varepsilon\); and (ii) for all pairs \((h_\varepsilon ,x_\varepsilon)\) satisfying (i), \(x_\varepsilon\) converges as \(\varepsilon \to 0.\) One says that \(f\) satisfies a linear (convex) perturbed (P-S) condition if these conditions hold with \(h_\varepsilon\in X^*\) (respectively, convex). The authors show that the perturbed (P-S) condition is effectively weaker than the (P-S) condition and give a characterization of the linear perturbed (P-S) condition for a function \(f\) defined on a Banach space with the Radon-Nikodým property, in terms of some strongly exposing functionals of the epigraph of \(f.\)