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Least energy solution for a scalar field equation with a singular nonlinearity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 January 2020

Jaeyoung Byeon
Affiliation:
Department of Mathematical Sciences, KAIST, Daejeon34141, Republic of Korea ([email protected])
Sun-Ho Choi
Affiliation:
Department of Applied Mathematics and Institute of Natural Sciences, Kyung Hee University, Yongin17104, Republic of Korea ([email protected])
Yeonho Kim
Affiliation:
Department of Mathematical Sciences, KAIST, Daejeon34141, Republic of Korea ([email protected])
Sang-Hyuck Moon
Affiliation:
National Center for Theoretical Sciences, National Taiwan University, Taipei10617, Taiwan ([email protected])

Abstract

We are concerned with a nonnegative solution to the scalar field equation

$$\Delta u + f(u) = 0{\rm in }{\open R}^N,\quad \mathop {\lim }\limits_{|x|\to \infty } u(x) = 0.$$
A classical existence result by Berestycki and Lions [3] considers only the case when f is continuous. In this paper, we are interested in the existence of a solution when f is singular. For a singular nonlinearity f, Gazzola, Serrin and Tang [8] proved an existence result when $f \in L^1_{loc}(\mathbb {R}) \cap \mathrm {Lip}_{loc}(0,\infty )$ with $\int _0^u f(s)\,{\rm d}s < 0$ for small $u>0.$ Since they use a shooting argument for their proof, they require the property that $f \in \mathrm {Lip}_{loc}(0,\infty ).$ In this paper, using a purely variational method, we extend the previous existence results for $f \in L^1_{loc}(\mathbb {R}) \cap C(0,\infty )$. We show that a solution obtained through minimization has the least energy among all radially symmetric weak solutions. Moreover, we describe a general condition under which a least energy solution has compact support.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Royal Society of Edinburgh 2020

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