1. Introduction
In recent years, the notion of fractional calculus has attracted the attention of several authors. Indeed, fractional calculus has become one of the most interesting tools in many fields, for example in mechanics as studied in Purohit and Kalla [
22], in oncolytic virotherapy as mentioned in Kumar et al. [
9], in motion of beam on nanowire for the interested reader we cite the paper of Erturk et al. [
10], in image processing one can see the monograph of Zhang et al. [
44], and in viscoelasticity which is developed in the article of Mainardi [
39]. Other important applications like physics, epidemiology, and engineering can be found in the papers [
4,
11,
24].
Because fractional differential operators are very important, several papers involving different derivatives, we cite for instance the papers of Ben Ali et al. [
5], Chamekh et al. [
29], Ghanmi and Horrigue [
31,
32], Horrigue [
34], Torres [
25], and Wang et al. [
43].
Very recently, several papers developed new derivatives like the derivative with respect to another function
which is one of the interesting derivatives see [
11,
24]. This operator generalizes some classical ones in the literature see [
11,
37,
38].
In the last few years, several authors have concentrated on the study of problems involving the
-Riemann fractional derivative, we cite for examples the papers of Alsaedi and Ghanmi [
1], Da Sousa et al. [
26,
27,
28], Almeida [
3], Nouf et al. [
41], Horrigue [
17]. More precisely, Nouf et al. [
41] used the mountain pass theorem to prove that the following problem
admits a nontrivial weak solution, where
,
,
and
are the operators in the sense of
-Riemann.
Alsaedi and Ghanmi [
1] studied the following problem
where
,
,
is the
p-Laplace operator,
and
are the operators in the sense of
-Hilfer which are introduce later in
Section 2. The authors justified that the mountain pass theorem ensures the existence of a solution for (
1), moreover, by the use of the
-symmetric version of this theorem, the existence of infinitely many solutions is proved.
In this work, we shall study a Kirchhoff problem of the following form:
where
,
,
and for some
,
the function
h is defined by
While, the functions , are such that the following condition holds:
There exist
r,
and
such that
moreover, for each
, we have
Remark 1.
Let are the antiderivatives of the functions f, g respectively with have the value zero at zero, and let H be the antiderivative of the function h with value zero at zero. If holds, then for each we have
Moreover, there exists , such that
Theorem 2. Under hypothesis , there exists such that if λ is large enough to satisfy , then (1) admits three nontrivial solutions. Moreover, one of these solutions is negative, the second one is positive, and the third one change.
3. Proof of Theorem 2
This section is devoted to proving the main result of this work, our main tools are based on variational methods, to be more precise, we construct three disjoint sets and prove that the energy functional admits one critical point in each set, after that, we prove that every critical point is a weak solution for the main problem. We begin by defining the space
as the closure of the space
according to the following norm
We recall from [
27] that the space
can be equivalently defined by:
Remark 7. ([19,27])The following properties hold:
- (i)
ϝ is a Banach space which is also reflexive and separable.
- (ii)
If or if , then, for all , we get
- (ii)
-
If , then for each , we have
where q is such that .
It is not difficult to see that if we combine the inequalities in Remark 7 with the definition of the norm
, one has
Next, we introduce the energy functional
, as follows:
where
It is not difficult to see that the functional
is of class
, and for each
, one has
So critical points of
are weak solutions for problem (
1).
Now, we will adopt the method used in [
30] to prove the existence of solutions. To this aim, let us introduce the following sets:
and
where
and
are given by:
Lemma 8. For all with and , there exist such that and . Moreover, In particular, if and are with disjoint supports, then .
Proof. To prove Lemma 8, we will only prove the result for , because the other cases can be proved analogously.
Let
with
, and put
Let
, then from hypothesis
and Remark 1, we have
Since , we can find small enough such that .
Again, from hypothesis
and Remark 1, we get
Since , then for s large enough, we have . Hence, by the Bolzano theorem, we deduce the existence of satisfying
Finally, from equation (
10) and the fact that
we conclude that
which yields to
, as we wanted to prove. □
Then we have the following result.
Lemma 9.
For each or , there exists , such that
Proof. Since the proofs are similar for the three cases. So, we will give the proof the result for
. For this aim, let
, then from the definition of
, the first inequality holds for
and
. On the other hand, from Remark 1 and equations (
3), (
5) and (6), we get
Hence, the result follows immediately if we take
□
Lemma 10. There exists a constant D such that , for all or for all .
Proof. Since the proofs are similar for the three cases, then, we will prove the result for
K, and omit it for
. Let
, then by definition of
K, we have
It follows from Equations (
5) and (6), that
where
if
, and
if
. Since
, then the result follows from equation (
11) and by putting
□
Next, we will present some important properties related to the manifolds and S.
Lemma 11. and S are sub-manifolds of ϝ of codimension respectively 1 and 2. The sets and K are complete. Moreover, for every or , we have . Moreover, we have a uniform continuity of the projection to the first coordinate on or S, where denoted the tangent space at χ of S.
Proof. We begin by observing that
where
is given byequation (
9) and
.
From the fact that the sets
,
and
are open, it suffice to prove that the sets
and
S are regular sub-manifold of
. To this end, we introduce the following
functions
and
, which are defined respectively by:
and
Since we have
and
, so we need to prove that 0 is a regular value of
and
in order to finish the proof. To this aim, let
then we have
From equation (
4), we have
So, using the fact that
, we get
Therefore, from the facts that
and
, we obtain
Hence, , which implies that . So, is a regular submanifold of .
The proof for is very similar to the first one and we omit it.
Now, for the case of S, we begin by observing that since and ., then it suffice to prove that for . This ensure that for each .
Next, we aim to proving that
. to this end, let
, then we have
Analogous, we can obtain that
, which implies that
S is a regular submanifold. Moreover, by classical arguments, we deduce The completeness of
and
K. Next, we shall prove that
where
. In fact, let
be a unit tangential vector in
. Put
It is clear that , and .
Similarly, we can prove that and .
Finally, if we combine the above equations with the estimates given in the first part of the proof, we conclude the uniform continuity of the projections onto and . □
Now, we define the notion of the Palais–Smale geometry.
Definition 12.
We say that Φ satisfies the Palais–Smale condition at level c if any sequence that satisfies
admits sub-sequence that converges strongly.
Lemma 13. If is small enough, then Φ satisfies the Palais–Smale condition at c.
Proof. Since the proof is very similar to the proof of Lemma 3.5 in the paper of Alsaedi and Ghanmi [
1], then we omit it. □
Next, in the following lemma, we will prove the Palais–Smale condition for the restricted functionals.
Lemma 14. The functionals and satisfy the Palais–Smale condition for energy level c, provided that is small enough.
Proof. Let be a Palais–Smale sequence, so we have is uniformly bounded and as j tends to infinity. We need to show that there exists a subsequence still denoted by that converges strongly in .
Let
be a unit tangential vector such that
Now, by Lemma 11, with and .
Since
is uniformly bounded, then by Lemma 9,
is uniformly bounded in
and hence
is uniformly bounded in
. Therefore, we get
As
is uniformly bounded and
strongly, the convergence to zero in equation (
12) is strongly. Finally, the result follows immediately from Lemma 13. □
As a consequence of Lemma 14, we have the following result.
Lemma 15. If or is a critical point of the restricted functionals or . Then, χ is also a critical point of the unrestricted functional Φ and hence is a weak solution to (1).
3.1. Proof of Theorem 2
From Lemma 15, to prove the Theorem 2, we shall prove that the functionals
and
have critical points. Since the same arguments are used for
and
, we will give the proof for
. It is clear from the definition of
, that
is bounded below over
. Then using Variational Principle due to Ekeland, there exists
, such that
From Lemma 8 and the estimate given in Lemma 9, there exists
such that
Now, from Lemma 8, we deduce that as . Then for large enough, we have that is small enough. So by Lemma 13, has a convergent subsequence, that we still call . Therefore has a critical point in denoted by .
In the same way,
has a critical point in
denoted by
. Put
, then from Lemma 15,
,
and
are weak solutions for problem (
1). Moreover, by construction,
is positive,
is negative and
changes sign.
Conclusion: In this paper we have investigated the existence and the multiplicity of solutions, moreover, we have introduced three-manifolds and proved that in each of these sets, the energy functional admits a critical point which is a nontrivial solution for the studied problem. So by definition of these manifolds, these solutions are one positive, one negative, and the other change sign. In the case when
our problem is reduced to the one studied by Nouf et al. [
41], and in the case when
, our problem is reduced to the one studied by Ghanmi and Zhang [
15]. We hope to develop other works by considering the singular double-phase problem.