Paper detail

Quasilinear elliptic equations and weighted Sobolev-Poincaré inequalities with distributional weights

We introduce a class of weak solutions to the quasilinear equation $-Δ_p u = σ|u|^{p-2}u$ in an open set $Ω\subset\mathbf{R}^n$. Here $p>1$, and $Δ_p u$ is the $p$-Laplacian operator. Our notion of solution is tailored to general distributional coefficients $σ$ satisfying a certain weighted Sobolev-Poincare inequality. We also study weak solutions of the closely related equation $-Δ_p v = (p-1)|\nabla v|^p + σ$, under the same conditions on $σ$. Our results for this latter equation will allow us to characterize the class of distributions $σ$ which satisfy the Sobolev-Poincare inequality, thereby extending earlier results on the form boundedness problem for the Schrödinger operator to $p\neq 2$.