In this paper, we prove the existence of topologically non-trivial solutions of the two-dimensional Adkins–Nappi model of nuclear physics; to this end, we minimize the energy functional by using the classical Skyrme ansatz, as well as a non-radially symmetric generalization of it. In both cases, we show that the minimization procedure preserves the topological degree of the minimization sequence.

In this paper, we study the existence of positive solutions to a semilinear nonlocal elliptic problem with the fractional α-Laplacian on Rn, 0 < α < n. We show that the problem has infinitely many positive solutions in $ {C^\tau}({R^n})\bigcap H_{loc}^{\alpha /2}({R^n}) $. Moreover, each of these solutions tends to some positive constant limit at infinity. We can extend our previous result about sub-elliptic problem to the nonlocal problem on Rn. We also show for α ∊ (0, 2) that in some cases, by the use of Hardy’s inequality, there is a nontrivial non-negative $ H_{loc}^{\alpha /2}({R^n}) $ weak solution to the problem

$$ {( - \Delta )^{\alpha /2}}u(x) = K(x){u^p} \quad {\rm{ in}} \ {R^n}, $$

We consider semilinear elliptic problems in which the right-hand-side nonlinearity depends on a parameter λ > 0. Two multiplicity results are presented, guaranteeing the existence of at least three non-trivial solutions for this kind of problem, when the parameter λ belongs to an interval (0,λ*). Our approach is based on variational techniques, truncation methods and critical groups. The first result incorporates as a special case problems with concave–convex nonlinearities, while the second one involves concave nonlinearities perturbed by an asymptotically linear nonlinearity at infinity.

This paper deals with periodic solutions for the billiard problem in a bounded open set of ${{\mathbb{R}}^{N}}$ which are limits of regular solutions of Lagrangian systems with a potential well. We give a precise link between the Morse index of approximate solutions (regarded as critical points of Lagrangian functionals) and the properties of the bounce trajectory to which they converge.