Research

# Solvability for p-Laplacian boundary value problem at resonance on the half-line

Weihua Jiang

Author Affiliations

College of Sciences, Hebei University of Science and Technology, Shijiazhuang, Hebei, 050018, P.R. China

Boundary Value Problems 2013, 2013:207  doi:10.1186/1687-2770-2013-207

The electronic version of this article is the complete one and can be found online at: http://www.boundaryvalueproblems.com/content/2013/1/207

 Received: 5 April 2013 Accepted: 23 August 2013 Published: 11 September 2013

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.

### Abstract

The existence of solutions for p-Laplacian boundary value problem at resonance on the half-line is investigated. Our analysis relies on constructing the suitable Banach space, defining appropriate operators and using the extension of Mawhin’s continuation theorem. An example is given to illustrate our main result.

MSC: 70K30, 34B10, 34B15.

##### Keywords:
p-Laplacian; resonance; half-line; multi-point boundary value problem; continuation theorem

### 1 Introduction

A boundary value problem is said to be a resonance one if the corresponding homogeneous boundary value problem has a non-trivial solution. Resonance problems can be expressed as an abstract equation , where L is a noninvertible operator. When L is linear, Mawhin’s continuation theorem [1] is an effective tool in finding solutions for these problems, see [2-10] and references cited therein. But it does not work when L is nonlinear, for instance, p-Laplacian operator. In order to solve this problem, Ge and Ren [11] proved a continuation theorem for the abstract equation when L is a noninvertible nonlinear operator and used it to study the existence of solutions for the boundary value problems with a p-Laplacian:

where , , . is nonlinear when .

As far as the boundary value problems on unbounded domain are concerned, there are many excellent results, see [12-15] and references cited therein.

To the best of our knowledge, there are few papers that study the p-Laplacian boundary value problem at resonance on the half-line. In this paper, we investigate the existence of solutions for the boundary value problem

(1.1)

where , , .

In order to obtain our main results, we always suppose that the following conditions hold.

(H1) , , .

(H2) is continuous, , and for any , there exists a nonnegative function such that

### 2 Preliminaries

For convenience, we introduce some notations and a theorem. For more details, see [11].

Definition 2.1[11]

Let X and Y be two Banach spaces with the norms , , respectively. A continuous operator is said to be quasi-linear if

(i) is a closed subset of Y,

(ii) is linearly homeomorphic to , , where domM denote the domain of the operator M.

Let and be the complement space of in X, then . On the other hand, suppose that is a subspace of Y, and that is the complement of in Y, i.e., . Let and be two projectors and an open and bounded set with the origin .

Definition 2.2[11]

Suppose that , is a continuous operator. Denote by N. Let . is said to be M-compact in if there exist a vector subspace of Y satisfying and an operator being continuous and compact such that for ,

(a) ,

(b) ,

(c) is the zero operator and ,

(d) .

Theorem 2.1[11]

LetXandYbe two Banach spaces with the norms, , respectively, andan open and bounded nonempty set. Suppose that

is a quasi-linear operator and, M-compact. In addition, if the following conditions hold:

(C1) , , ,

(C2) ,

then the abstract equationhas at least one solution in, where, is a homeomorphism with.

### 3 Main result

Let with norm , where . with norm . Then and are Banach spaces.

Define operators and as follows:

where

Then the boundary value problem (1.1) is equivalent to .

Obviously,

It is clear that KerM is linearly homeomorphic to ℝ, and is closed. So, M is a quasi-linear operator.

Define , as

where , . We can easily obtain that , are projectors. Set , .

Define an operator :

where , . By (H1) and (H2), we get that is continuous.

Lemma 3.1[15]

is compact ifandare both equicontinuous on any compact intervals ofand equiconvergent at infinity.

Lemma 3.2is compact.

Proof Let be nonempty and bounded. There exists a constant such that , . It follows from (H2) that there exists a nonnegative function such that

For any , , , , we have

Since are equicontinuous on , we get that are equicontinuous on .

Let

Then

(3.1)

For , , , we have

It follows from the absolute continuity of integral that are equicontinuous on . Since is uniformly continuous on , by (3.1), we can obtain that are equicontinuous on .

For , since

and is uniformly continuous on , for any , there exists a constant such that if , then

(3.2)

Since

(3.3)

there exists a constant such that if , then

(3.4)

For , by (3.2), (3.3) and (3.4), we have

and

By Lemma 3.1, we get that is compact. The proof is completed. □

In the spaces X and Y, the origin . In the following sections, we denote the origin by 0.

Lemma 3.3Letbe nonempty, open and bounded. ThenisM-compact in.

Proof By (H2), we know that is continuous. Obviously, . For , since is a zero operator, we get . For , . So, we have . It is clear that

and , . means that and , thus,

For , we have

These, together with Lemma 3.2, mean that is M-compact in . The proof is completed. □

In order to obtain our main results, we need the following additional conditions.

(H3) There exist nonnegative functions , , with and such that

(H4) There exists a constant such that if , then one of the following inequalities holds:

Lemma 3.4Assume that (H3) and (H4) hold. The set

is bounded inX.

Proof If , then , i.e., . By (H4), there exists such that . It follows from that

Considering (H3), we have

(3.5)

Since , we get

Thus,

(3.6)

By (3.5), (3.6) and (H3), we get

So,

This, together with (3.6), means that is bounded. The proof is completed. □

Lemma 3.5Assume that (H4) holds. The set

is bounded inX.

Proof means that , and , i.e.,

By (H4), we get that . So, is bounded. The proof is completed. □

Theorem 3.1Suppose that (H1)-(H4) hold. Then problem (1.1) has at least one solution.

Proof Let , where . It follows from the definition of and that , , and , .

Define a homeomorphism as . If for , take the homotopy

For , we have . Then

Obviously, , . For , , if , we have

A contradiction with , . If , , take

and the contradiction follows analogously. So, we obtain , , .

By the homotopy of degree, we get that

By Theorem 2.1, we can get that has at least one solution in . The proof is completed. □

### 4 Example

Let us consider the following boundary value problem at resonance

(4.1)

where , , .

Corresponding to problem (1.1), we have , .

Take , , , . By simple calculation, we can get that conditions (H1)-(H4) hold. By Theorem 3.1, we obtain that problem (4.1) has at least one solution.

### Competing interests

The author declares that she has no competing interests.

### Author’s contributions

All results belong to WJ.

### Acknowledgements

This work is supported by the National Science Foundation of China (11171088) and the Natural Science Foundation of Hebei Province (A2013208108). The author is grateful to anonymous referees for their constructive comments and suggestions, which led to the improvement of the original manuscript.

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