Multiplicity of solutions for a nonhomogeneous quasilinear elliptic equation with concave-convex nonlinearities

Abstract

Abstract We investigate the multiplicity of solutions for a quasilinear scalar field equation with a nonhomogeneous differential operator defined by S u ≔ − div ϕ u 2 + ∣ ∇ u ∣ 2 2 ∇ u + ϕ u 2 + ∣ ∇ u ∣ 2 2 u , Su:= -\hspace{0.1em}\text{div}\hspace{0.1em}\left\{\phi \left(\frac{{u}^{2}+{| \nabla u| }^{2}}{2}\right)\nabla u\right\}+\phi \left(\frac{{u}^{2}+{| \nabla u| }^{2}}{2}\right)u, where ϕ : [ 0 , + ∞ ) → R \phi :\left[0,+\infty )\to {\mathbb{R}} is a positive continuous function. This operator is introduced by Stuart [Two positive solutions of a quasilinear elliptic Dirichlet problem, Milan J. Math. 79 (2011), 327–341] and depends on not only ∇ u \nabla u but also u u . This particular quasilinear term generally appears in the study of nonlinear optics model, which describes the propagation of self-trapped beam in a cylindrical optical fiber made from a self-focusing dielectric material. When the reaction term is concave-convex nonlinearities, by using the Nehari manifold and doing a fine analysis associated on the fibering map, we obtain that the equation admits at least one positive energy solution and negative energy solution, which is also the ground state solution of the equation. We overcome two main difficulties which are caused by the nonhomogeneity of the differential operator S S : (i) the almost everywhere convergence of the gradient for the minimizing sequence { u n } \left\{{u}_{n}\right\} ; (ii) seeking the reasonable restrictions about S S .