Least-energy solutions of the Br\'ezis-Nirenberg problem in the non-coercive case in dimension $3$

Abstract

Let $\Omega$ be a bounded, smooth domain of $\mathbb{R}^n, n \ge 3$ and $\lambda \ge 0$. We consider the celebrated Br\'ezis-Nirenberg problem: \begin{equation}\label{eq:critlambda:abs} \tag{*} \left\{\begin{aligned} -\Delta u -\lambda u & =\left|u\right|^{2^*-2}u &\hbox{ in } \Omega, u & = 0 \quad \text{ in } \partial \Omega, \end{aligned}\right. \end{equation} where $2^* = \frac{2n}{n-2}$. When $n=3$ we investigate the existence of \emph{least-energy solutions} for this problem, that we define as having the lowest $L^{2^*}(\Omega)$ norm among all non-zero solutions. We prove that least-energy solutions of the Br\'ezis-Nirenberg problem exist when $\lambda$ belongs to a left neighbourhood of any eigenvalue of $-\Delta$ that we explicitly characterise by a positive mass assumption. We obtain in particular the first \emph{existence} result for the Br\'ezis-Nirenberg problem on a general smooth bounded domain $\Omega$ when $n=3$ and $\lambda \ge \Lambda_1$. In order to do this we introduce, for any $\lambda \ge 0$, a new variational problem inspired from spectral-theoretic considerations which is as follows: for any $u \in L^{2^*}(\Omega), u>0$ a.e., we consider the principal eigenvalue of $- \Delta-\lambda$ on the weighted space $L^2(\Omega, u^{2^*-2} dx)$, whose value we then minimise over the set of normalised weights $\Vert u \Vert_{2^*} = 1$. When $\lambda \ge \Lambda_1$ this defines a new, non-smooth variational problem for which we develop a variational theory. We prove that its minimisers exist under the aforementioned positive mass assumption and that they yield \emph{least-energy} solutions. We also obtain new results in the higher-dimensional case $n \ge 4$, where we show that the energy function of the Br\'ezis-Nirenberg problem is discontinuous exactly at the eigenvalues of $- \Delta$.