Infinitely many free or prescribed mass solutions for fractional Hartree equations and Pohozaev identities

Abstract

Abstract In this paper we study the following nonlinear fractional Hartree (or Choquard-Pekar) equation ( − Δ ) s u + μ u = ( I α * F ( u ) ) F ′ ( u )   in R N , ${\left(-{\Delta}\right)}^{s}u+\mu u=\left({I}_{\alpha }{\ast}F\left(u\right)\right){F}^{\prime }\left(u\right)\quad \text{in} {\mathbb{R}}^{N},$ (*) where μ > 0, s ∈ (0, 1), N ≥ 2, α ∈ (0, N), I α ∼ 1 | x | N − α ${I}_{\alpha }\sim \frac{1}{\vert x{\vert }^{N-\alpha }}$ is the Riesz potential, and F is a general subcritical nonlinearity. The goal is to prove existence of multiple (radially symmetric) solutions u ∈ H s ( R N ) $u\in {H}^{s}\left({\mathbb{R}}^{N}\right)$ , by assuming F odd or even: we consider both the case μ > 0 fixed and the case ∫ R N u 2 = m > 0 ${\int }_{{\mathbb{R}}^{N}}{u}^{2}=m{ >}0$ prescribed. Here we also simplify some arguments developed for s = 1 (S. Cingolani, M. Gallo, and K. Tanaka, “Multiple solutions for the nonlinear Choquard equation with even or odd nonlinearities,” Calc. Var. Partial Differ. Equ., vol. 61, no. 68, p. 34, 2022). A key point in the proof is given by the research of suitable multidimensional odd paths, which was done in the local case by Berestycki and Lions (H. Berestycki and P.-L. Lions, “Nonlinear scalar field equations II: existence of infinitely many solutions,” Arch. Ration. Mech. Anal., vol. 82, no. 4, pp. 347–375, 1983); for (*) the nonlocalities play indeed a special role. In particular, some properties of these paths are needed in the asymptotic study (as μ varies) of the mountain pass values of the unconstrained problem, then exploited to describe the geometry of the constrained problem and detect infinitely many normalized solutions for any m > 0. The found solutions satisfy in addition a Pohozaev identity: in this paper we further investigate the validity of this identity for solutions of doubly nonlocal equations under a C 1-regularity.