Nontrivial solutions for a quasilinear elliptic system

Cheng and Yang Boundary Value Problems 2014, 2014:34 http://www.boundaryvalueproblems.com/content/2014/1/34 RESEARCH Open Access Nontrivial solutions for a quasilinear elliptic system Xiyou Cheng* and Lu Yang * Correspondence: School of Mathematics and Statistics, Lanzhou University, Lanzhou, 730000, P.R. China Abstract In this paper, we deal with the existence of three nontrivial solutions for the potential system of p-Laplacian equations with homogeneous Dirichlet boundary conditions. Applying the Nehari procedure and abstract linking theorem on a product space, we give a linking structure for our variational problem, and then, combining with the classical minimax principle, we obtain three nontrivial critical values for the relevant energy functional. MSC: 35J20; 35J25 Keywords: elliptic equations; Nehari manifold; linking theorem; minimax principle 1 Introduction In this paper, we are concerned with the multiplicity of nontrivial solutions for the following system of quasilinear equations: ⎧ ⎪ ⎪ ⎨–Δp u = f (x, u) + λh (x, u, v), in , ⎪ ⎪ ⎩ –Δp v = f (x, v) + λh (x, u, v), in , u = v = , on ∂, (.) where –Δpi u = div(|∇u|pi – ∇u) (pi > ),  is a bounded smooth domain in RN (N ≥ ), fi :  × R+ → R+ , hi :  × R+ × R+ → R+ are Carathéodory functions (i = , ), and there exists a function H ∈ C  ( × R × R, R) such that     ∇H(x, u, v) = Hu (x, u, v), Hv (x, u, v) = h (x, u, v), h (x, u, v) . In recent years, many authors have studied the existence of nontrivial solutions for Laplacian systems and p-Laplacian systems, see [–] and the references therein. Usually the authors change the problem into the critical point problem of the corresponding energy functional and then apply the critical point theory or the variational method, or they change it into the fixed point problem of the corresponding compactly continuous mapping and then apply topological degree theory or the method of lower and upper solutions. For instance, in [] Costa and Magalhaes unified the cooperative and noncooperative Laplacian systems, and they got the existence of nontrivial solutions via the variational approach; in [] Conti et al. dealt with the competitive Laplacian system, and they established the existence of positive solutions by the Nehari procedure, critical point theory, and topological degree theory; in [, ] the authors studied the sublinear p-Laplacian systems, and ©2014 Cheng and Yang; licensee Springer. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Cheng and Yang Boundary Value Problems 2014, 2014:34 http://www.boundaryvalueproblems.com/content/2014/1/34 they obtained the existence of positive solutions by the method of lower and upper solutions and Leray-Schauder degree theory, respectively; in [] Zhang and Zhang considered the existence of nontrivial solutions for nonlinear Laplacian systems and p-Laplacian systems applying the direct variational method. More recently, some authors discussed the multiplicity of nontrivial solutions for Laplacian systems and p-Laplacian systems, see [– ] and references therein. In [, , ], the authors provided the existence results of three nontrivial solutions for system (.) with one parameter for the case p = , where the main methods used are the Nehari procedure and the linking theorem on product space. In [] Motreanu and Zhang consider a general noncoercive quasilinear elliptic system, they establish the existence of two opposite constant sign solutions; in the case where the system has a variational structure, under the proper hypotheses, they obtain a third nontrivial solution, which is sign changing in the sense that one cannot have both components of the new solution of the same constant sign; their approach relies on a suitable method of sub-supersolutions combined with truncation and variational arguments that do not require a subcritical growth condition. In [] Shen and Zhang established the existence of two positive solutions for multi-parameter p-Laplacian systems with critical exponents by use of the Nehari procedure and the variational approach. In [, ], the present author and coauthors dealt with a class of Laplacian systems with superlinear and sublinear terms applying the fixed point index formula on a product cone, and they obtained the existence and multiplicity of positive solutions. Motivated by some ideas in [, , , ], we shall deal with the existence of nonnegative solutions (especially, positive solutions) for system (.) with superlinear and subcritical nonlinear terms. It is well known that the Ambrosetti-Rabinowitz type result (see [, ]) can be extended to system (.) with superlinear and subcritical nonlinear terms by imposing the Ambrosetti-Rabinowitz conditions and other proper conditions on nonlinear terms. Now, we have a natural question of when system (.) has multiple nonnegative solutions. In order to obtain the multiplicity of nonnegative solutions for system (.), we need only to construct the multiple critical values of the corresponding energy functional. For this matter, first we get two ground states in view of the Nehari procedure, establish a linking structure by the abstract linking theorem on the product space, and then construct the third critical value by the classical minimax principle. The present paper is organized as following. In Section , we provide a linking structure for our variational problem (see Theorem .); in Section , we verify that the energy functional satisfies the (P.S.) condition (see Theorem .); in Section , we prove the existence of three nonnegative solutions for system (.) as λ is small enough, and, in addition, one of them is positive if the equations excluding coupled terms have both a unique positive solution (see Theorem .). 2 Linking structure In this section, we list some preliminaries, including the abstract linking theorem on the product space and the concept of Nehari manifold, and then we give a linking structure, which is useful for constructing the critical value of the functional associated with system (.). Definition . [] Let f be a real functional on Banach space X and c be a real constant, we say that Sfc = {u ∈ X | f (u) = c, u = } has the sphere property, if the following hypotheses are satisfied: Page 2 of 9 Cheng and Yang Boundary Value Problems 2014, 2014:34 http://www.boundaryvalueproblems.com/content/2014/1/34 Page 3 of 9 (S ) f is continuous on X; (S ) there is a homeomorphic mapping between Sfc and unit sphere of X; (S ) for any fixed u ∈ X\{}, the equation f (tu) = c has a unique solution t ∈ (, ∞); (S ) X is separated into two open connected subsets by Sfc and the origin is contained in one of the subsets. Theorem . [] Let X, Y be Ban (...truncated)