A note on quasilinear Schrödinger equations with singular or vanishing radial potentials

Abstract

In this note, we complete the study of [3], where we got existence results for the quasilinear elliptic equation \begin{equation*} -\Delta w+ V\left( \left| x\right| \right) w - w \left( \Delta w^2 \right)= K(|x|) g(w) \quad \text{in }\mathbb{R}^{N}, \end{equation*} with singular or vanishing continuous radial potentials $V(r)$, $K(r)$. In [3], we assumed, for technical reasons, that $K(r)$ was vanishing as $r \rightarrow 0$, while in the present paper, we remove this obstruction. To face the problem, we apply a suitable change of variables $w=f(u)$ and we find existence of non negative solutions by the application of variational methods. Our solutions satisfy a weak formulations of the above equation, but they are in fact classical solutions in $\mathbb{R}^{N} \setminus \{0\}$. The nonlinearity $g$ has a double-power behavior, whose standard example is $g(t) = \min \{ t^{q_1 -1}, t^{q_2 -1} \}$ ($t > 0$), recovering the usual case of a single-power behavior when $q_1 = q_2$.