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When does a perturbed Moser-Trudinger inequality admit an extremal?

In this paper, we are interested in several questions raised mainly in [17]. We consider the perturbed Moser-Trudinger inequality $I\_α^g(Ω)$ below, at the critical level $α=4π$, where $g$, satisfying $g(t)\to 0$ as $t\to +\infty$, can be seen as a perturbation with respect to the original case $g\equiv 0$. Under some additional assumptions, ensuring basically that $g$ does not oscillates too fast as $t\to +\infty$, we identify a new condition on $g$ for this inequality to have an extremal. This condition covers the case $g\equiv 0$ studied in [3,12,23]. We prove also that this condition is sharp in the sense that, if it is not satisfied, $I\_{4π}^g(Ω)$ may have no extremal.