Nontrivial Solution for Indefinite Quasilinear Schrödinger-Poisson Systems ()
1. Introduction
The study of Schrödinger-Poisson systems has garnered significant attention due to its importance in various physical contexts, including plasma physics, nonlinear optics, and quantum mechanics. These systems describe the interaction between a quantum field and a classical potential, capturing a wide range of phenomena such as wave-particle interactions and the dynamics of charged particles. Early work on these systems dates back to the pioneering studies of [1] and [2], who investigated the existence and regularity of solutions to nonlinear Schrödinger equations with Poisson-type potentials in both the non-relativistic and relativistic limits. In particular, the seminal contributions of [3] and [4] explored the asymptotic behavior of solutions in the context of nonlinear field equations, providing crucial insights into the existence of solitary waves and the stability of solutions.
In [5], the authors consider the Schrödinger-Poisson:
(1.1)
where
denotes the unknown function,
represents the potential energy function,
is the nonlinear term, and
is the potential field given by Poisson’s equation. The paper explores the existence of solutions to the (1.1) under minimal assumptions, specifically without relying on the classic Ambrosetti-Rabinowitz condition, which is often used to ensure the applicability of the mountain pass theorem in variational problems. While these foundational results have advanced the understanding of simpler forms of Schrödinger-Poisson systems, they have largely focused on linear or mildly nonlinear models, assuming specific boundary conditions or simplifying the potential terms. However, in more complex and realistic physical models, the potential function is often not a constant but rather an indefinite function, leading to more intricate mathematical structures. The Schrödinger operator in this case exhibits a non-trivial spectral behavior, which complicates the existence theory for solutions.
Since then, system (1.1) has attracted considerable attention in recent decades, which can be seen in [6]-[10] and the references therein. We emphasize that in all these papers, the authors only considered the case where the Schrödinger operator
is positive definite. In this case, the mountain pass theorem can be applied. However, when the potential
is negative somewhere so that the quadratic part of the energy functional is indefinite the mountain pass theorem is not applicable anymore. The mountain pass theorem requires the energy functional to have a strict local minimum at the origin, resembling a mountain surrounded by valleys. This property is typically guaranteed when the quadratic part of the functional, governed by the Schrödinger operator
, is positive definite. However, in our case, the potential
is indefinite, meaning the operator has a finite-dimensional negative space. Consequently, the quadratic part of our functional is also indefinite. This results in the origin
being a saddle point rather than a local minimum, immediately violating a fundamental hypothesis of the mountain pass theorem.
In [11], Liu and Wu investigate the following Schrödinger-Poisson system with 4-superlinear nonlinear terms:
(1.2)
where the potential function
is allowed to be an indefinite potential and the nonlinear term
is 4-superlinear, meaning it grows faster than quadratic or cubic growth. Traditionally, to ensure the application of variational methods, the potential function
is usually required to be positive, guaranteeing that the energy functional of the system possesses a mountain pass geometric structure. However, in this study, the authors relax this assumption by allowing the potential function to be indefinite (i.e., it may take both positive and negative values). This causes the energy functional to lose the classical mountain pass geometry, rendering traditional variational methods inapplicable. To overcome this difficulty, the authors employ Morse theory and the local linking method, successfully proving that the system still admits nontrivial solutions even without the traditional assumptions. Furthermore, by considering the odd function symmetry of the nonlinear term, the paper demonstrates that the system not only has solutions but actually possesses infinitely many solutions.
Recent developments in the study of quasilinear Schrödinger-Poisson systems have revealed significant mathematical challenges and novel solution approaches. The work synthesizes key contributions from several research groups addressing both theoretical and methodological aspects of these systems. In recent investigation [12], Ding, Li and Meng extended previous results from [13] concerning standard Schrödinger-Poisson systems to the more complex quasilinear framework. The generalized system takes the form:
(1.3)
where the nonlinearity
demonstrates asymptotic linearity with respect to
at infinity. Under appropriate hypotheses governing the functions
,
and
, the authors established the existence of ground state solutions for system (1.3). Furthermore, they conducted a detailed analysis of the asymptotic behavior of these solutions as the parameter
approaches zero.
Another significant contribution [14] addressed quasilinear Schrödinger-Poisson systems exhibiting critical nonlinearities:
(1.4)
Here, the function
represents a subcritical nonlinearity satisfying a modified Ambrosetti-Rabinowitz condition: there exists
such that
(1.5)
To overcome analytical difficulties arising from the quasilinear Poisson equation’s limited regularity properties, the researchers implemented a sophisticated functional truncation technique. This approach enabled the study of mountain pass type solutions for system (1.4) for large values of the parameter
. Subsequent work [15] extended these results to two-dimensional configurations with exponential critical nonlinearities.
The analysis becomes particularly challenging when the Ambrosetti-Rabinowitz condition (1.5) is not satisfied. Recent work by Wei, Li and Zhao [16] investigated the parameter-dependent system:
(1.6)
where
constitutes a coercive potential and
satisfies condition (1.5) with
. The case
presents particular difficulties due to the failure of standard variational structure. Through innovative truncation methodologies, Wei, Li and Zhao demonstrated that solution existence and asymptotic behavior depend critically on the parameter
. Specifically, nontrivial solutions were obtained for sufficiently small
, with comprehensive asymptotic analysis conducted as both
and
approach zero independently.
Inspired by the above literature, we consider the following Quasilinear Schrödinger-Poisson systems:
(1.7)
This paper addresses the scenario where the potential function
is bounded, which may invalidate the compact embedding property discussed previously. Drawing inspiration from our earlier observations and previous research on Chern-Simons-Schrödinger systems [17], we employ the integrability condition (f4) to establish the Palais-Smale condition.
We now present the fundamental assumptions regarding the functions
and
:
(V) The potential function
belongs to
and is bounded. The quadratic form defined by
is non-degenerate, and its negative eigenspace has finite dimension.
(f1) The nonlinearity
is continuous on
and satisfies the growth condition
for some positive constant
and exponent
.
(f2) The function
exhibits superlinear behavior near the origin, with
as
, uniformly for all
.
(f3) For all
, the following inequalities hold:
where
. Furthermore, for almost every
,
(f4) There exist functions
and
, with
, such that
By utilizing condition (f4), we can prove that the derivative corresponding to the nonlinear term is compact. Before presenting our main results, we introduce some necessary notation for the working space. Define the following Hilbert space:
Within this space, we define the inner product and its corresponding norm as:
Additionally, we denote the standard Lebesgue space
for
.
For
,
denotes the Banach space, which is the completion of the test functions
with respect to the
norm of the gradient. We introduce the space
which is a Banach space endowed with the norm
It is evident that
is continuously embedded into
. Additionally, by the Sobolev embedding theorem,
is continuously embedded into
. The variational functional
associated with system (1.7) is defined as follows:
To address the issue of compactness, we will analyze the functional
by restricting it to the function space
.
Theorem 1.1 Provided that the hypotheses (V) and (f1)-(f4) are valid, there exists a nontrivial solution to the system (1.7).
As previously indicated, the functional
is not amenable to analysis via either the mountain pass technique or the linking theorem. Interestingly,
exhibits a local linking structure around the origin. However, contemporary critical point results that incorporate local linking invariably necessitate a global compactness assumption on the functional. In the work of Liu and Wu [11], condition (f’) was employed to guarantee this compactness property. In the present contribution, our assumption (f4) fulfills an analogous role in ensuring the required compactness condition.
The paper is organized as follows: Section 2 is dedicated to some preliminary results. In Section 3, we prove Theorem 1.1.
2. Preliminaries
This section establishes the foundational framework essential for our subsequent analysis. We begin by examining key attributes of the quasilinear Poisson equation embedded within system (1.7). Following this exposition, we define a variational functional characterized by the property that its stationary points correspond precisely to weak solutions of the aforementioned system. This section introduces the quasilinear Poisson equation, which is a component of the system previously labeled as (1.7):
(2.1)
Based on the work in [14], for every element
residing in the function space
, the map defined by
exhibits linearity and continuity. As a result,
can be regarded as a member of the dual space
. This guarantees that there is a single function
in
that fulfills the requirements of problem (2.1). In variational form, for any admissible test function
, the following equality is valid:
(2.2)
In the following exposition, the notation
will uniformly indicate the unique solution to (2.1). For an arbitrary
, commencing from equation (2.2) and employing Hölder’s inequality combined with the Sobolev inequality, we derive the following relation:
(2.3)
which implies that
Therefore, we arrive at the estimate:
(2.4)
As previously mentioned, we will examine system (1.7) in the function space
. It is evident that the critical points of the
-functional
on
correspond to the weak solutions of system (1.7). However, the functional
is highly indefinite, meaning it is unbounded both from below and above. This prevents us from using the standard variational methods. To overcome this, we apply a reduction method outlined in [11], which leads us to study the one-variable functional that is no longer strongly indefinite. Following equation (2.4), we define the functional
as
which is given explicitly by
Since
, for any
, we have the derivative
Under the assumption (V), we can introduce an equivalent norm
on the function space
with the property that the energy functional
takes the form:
where
and
represent the orthogonal projections of
onto the positive and negative subspaces
and
respectively, which are defined by the quadratic form
.
Next, we will introduce Morse theory and its related propositions: Consider a Banach space
and a
functional
. Let
be an isolated critical point of
with
. The
-th critical group of
at
is defined as:
where
and
denotes singular homology with integer coefficients. Assuming
satisfies the Palais-Smale condition and its critical values are bounded below by some
, we follow Bartsch and Li [18] to define the
-th critical group at infinity as:
By the deformation lemma, this homology group is independent of the particular choice of
.
Lemma 2.1. Suppose that
is continuous and satisfies (f4). For the functional
,
is well defined and of class
with
Moreover,
is compact and under assumption (f4), we prove that
(2.5)
Proof. From (1.9) we have
so it is well known that
is well defined and of class
. The compactness of
follows from [19]. By the continuity of embedding:
↪
, if
in
, then
in
. Up to a subsequence,
in
. Hence
So
in
. This allows us to establish the following estimate:
So we get that
To obtain a convergent subsequence of the (PS) sequence, we need certain compactness properties of operators involving
. Consider the
-functional
defined as:
For all
, we have
The following results from Zhao [20] and Zhao [21] are critical in our analysis.
Proposition 2.2. ([20])
is weakly lower semi-continuous, and
is weakly sequentially continuous, where
is the dual space of
.
Based on the above proposition, we can obtain the following result:
Lemma 2.3. Let
in
, then
(2.6)
Proof. By applying Proposition 2.2, we get
Thus,
Lemma 2.4. Given that conditions (V) and (f1) - (f4) are satisfied, the functional
is shown to meet the Palais-Smale (PS) condition.
Proof. Consider a Palais-Smale sequence
for the functional
, which satisfies the following two conditions:
1) The sequence of functional values is bounded:
2) The derivative of the functional converges to zero:
as
We will now prove the boundedness of the (PS) sequence. If
as
, employing condition (f3), we can get:
which is a contradiction to the fact that
, so we can get
is bounded.
By selecting an appropriate subsequence, we may assume that the sequence
in
. Under this assumption, the following convergence relationship holds:
Building upon this convergence property, we proceed with the following derivation:
(2.7)
From (2.5) - (2.7), we obtain the following inequality chain:
Building upon the weak lower semi-continuity property of the norm functional
, we establish the following inequality chain:
This inequality implies the convergence
(2.8)
Combining this result with the previously established convergence
(given the finite-dimensional nature of the subspace
(
), it follows that the sequence
converges strongly to
in
). Consequently, the corresponding norm sequence
(2.9)
From (2.8) and (2.9), we deduce that
, which in turn yields the strong convergence
in the space
.
Proposition 2.5. ([18]) If
satisfies the Palais-Smale condition and there exists
such that
, then
possesses a nonzero critical point.
Proposition 2.6. ([22]) Let
satisfy the Palais-Smale condition. Suppose
exhibits a local linking structure at the origin relative to the direct sum decomposition
, meaning for some
:
for all
,
for all
,
where
. If
is finite-dimensional with
, then
.
Lemma 2.7. If conditions (V), (f1) - (f3) are satisfied and there exists a constant
such that for any function
with
, then the following inequality holds:
Proof. Otherwise, there exists a sequence
such that
but
(2.10)
Consequently,
(2.11)
Let
and
be the orthogonal projection of
on
. Then
for some
, because
.
Now suppose
, then the set
has positive Lebesgue measure. For
we have
and
thanks to (1.8). Then the Fatou’s lemma yields
(2.12)
If
, then for some
, we have
in
. Similar to (2.12), we have
Hence, using (2.10), we get
a contradiction. Therefore
. From
we see that
. Consequently, for
large enough,
violating (2.11). Hence, the desired result is proven.
Remark 2.8. Let
denote the unit ball in the function space
. By applying the results from (1.8) and (2.4), it can be established that for every element
belonging to the boundary
, the functional
exhibits the following asymptotic behavior:
This property characterizes the behavior of
along rays emanating from the origin in the direction of boundary points of the unit ball.
For sufficiently large positive constants
, an application of Lemma 2.7 enables the construction of a deformation retraction from the complement
to the sublevel set
. This construction yields the isomorphism:
(2.13)
The vanishing of these critical groups provides important topological information about the functional
at infinity.
3. The Proof of Theorem 1.1
Proof. Under the hypotheses (V), (f2), (f3) and (2.4), a direct computation reveals that as the norm
approaches zero, the following asymptotic estimates hold:
Consequently, the functional
admits the asymptotic expansion:
This asymptotic behavior implies the existence of a radius
such that
takes positive values on the punctured positive cone
and negative values on the punctured negative cone
. This establishes that
possesses a local linking structure with respect to the direct sum decomposition
, so we can establish the existence of a (PS) sequence.
Given that
, an application of Proposition 2.6 yields the nonvanishing of the critical group
. Comparing this result with the identity (2.13), we conclude that the critical groups at the origin and at infinity are distinct:
By Lemma 2.4 and Proposition 2.5, this completes the proof of the theorem.
Acknowledgements
This work was supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 12161038, 12301584), Jiangxi Provincial Natural Science Foundation (Grant No. 20232BAB201009), Science and Technology Project of Jiangxi Provincial Department of Education (Grant No. GJJ2400901).
Author Contributions
All authors have accepted responsibility for the entire content of this manuscript and consented to its submission to the journal, reviewed all the results and approved the final version of the manuscript. Guzhen Huang proposed research ideas and writing original draft preparation. Li Wang provided the idea for the study and led the implementation review and revision of the manuscript. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.