THE EXISTENCE OF NONTRIVIAL SOLUTIONS TO A SEMILINEAR ELLIPTIC SYSTEM ON R N WITHOUT THE AMBROSETTI-RABINOWITZ CONDITION

In this paper, we prove the existence of at least one positive solution pair (u, v) ∈ H 1 (R N ) × H 1 (R N ) to the following semilinear elliptic system{-u + u = f(x, v), x ∈RN ,-v + v = g(x,u), x ∈ R N ,(0.1) by using a linking theorem and the concentration-compactness principle. The main con-ditions we imposed on the nonnegative functions f, g ∈ C 0 (R N × R 1 ) are that, f (x, t) and g(x, t) are superlinear at t = 0 as well as at t = +∞, that f and g are subcritical in t and satisfy a kind of monotonic conditions. We mention that we do not assume that f or g satisfies the Ambrosetti-Rabinowitz condition as usual. Our main result can be viewed as an extension to a recent result of Miyagaki and Souto [J. Diff. Equ. 245(2008), 3628-3638] concerning the existence of a positive solution to the semilinear elliptic boundary value problem{-u + u = f(x, u), x ∈Ω,u ∈H10(Ω)where ΩRN is bounded and a result of Li and Yang [G. Li and J. Yang: Communications in P.D.E. Vol. 29(2004) Nos.5 & 6.pp.925–954, 2004] concerning (0.1) when f and g are asymptotically linear.