The Method of Upper and Lower Solutions for Some Nonlinear Boundary Value Problems in Unbounded Domains

Abstract

Let D be a bounded domain in the Euclidean space RN(N ≦ 2) and let where is the closure of D. We assume that the boundary ∂G of G is smooth. Consider the boundary value problem (abbreviated to BVP in the sequel).(1)(1)where A is a nonlinear elliptic differential operator in divergence form of Leray-Lions type, ∇u = grad u, f is a distribution on G and p(x, t, η) is a function defined on G × R × RN. Among other hypotheses we shall, roughly speaking, assume that p has completely unrelated growth rates in the first and the third variables. In this paper we prove the solvability of the BVP (1), (2) under the assumption that it has both an upper solution ψ and a lower solution φ with φ ≧ ψ.