Existence and uniqueness of nontrivial solutions for eigenvalue boundary value problem of nonlinear fractional differential equation

Abstract

In this paper, we study the existence and uniqueness of a nontrivial solution to eigenvalue problems for the following nonlinear fractional differential equation of the form $$\begin{aligned} \left\{ \begin{array}{l} -D^{\alpha }_{0^{+}}u(t)=\lambda [f(t, u(t), D^{\beta }_{0^{+}}u(t))+g(t)],~~ 0<t<1,\\ u(0)=u(1)=0, \end{array} \right. \end{aligned}$$ where \(\lambda \) is a parameter, \(D^{\alpha }_{0^{+}},D^{\beta }_{0^{+}}\) are two standard Riemann–Liouville fractional derivatives, \(0 1,f: [0,1]\times {\mathbb{R }}\times {\mathbb{R }}\rightarrow {\mathbb{R }}\) is continuous, and \(g(t): (0, 1)\rightarrow [0, +\infty )\) is Lebesgue integrable. We obtain several sufficient conditions of the existence and uniqueness of nontrivial solution of the above eigenvalue problems when \(\lambda \) is in some interval. Our approach is based on the Leray–Schauder nonlinear alternative. In addition, some examples are included to demonstrate the main result.