Existence of positive solutions to quasi-linear elliptic equations with exponential growth in the whole Euclidean space

In this paper a quasi-linear elliptic equation in the whole Euclidean space is considered. The nonlinearity of the equation is assumed to have exponential growth or have critical growth in view of Trudinger-Moser type inequality. Under some assumptions on the potential and the nonlinearity, it is proved that there is a nontrivial positive weak solution to this equation. Also it is shown that there are two distinct positive weak solutions to a perturbation of the equation. The method of proving these results is combining Trudinger-Moser type inequality, Mountain-pass theorem and Eke land's variational principle. (C) 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.