Critical functions and elliptic PDE on compact Riemannian manifolds

Abstract

We study in this work the existence of minimizing solutions to the critical-power type equation $\triangle _{\textbf{g}}u+h.u=f .u^{\frac{n+2}{n-2}} $ on a compact Riemannian manifold in the limit case normally not solved by variational methods. For this purpose, we use a concept of "critical function" that was originally introduced by E. Hebey and M. Vaugon for the study of the second best constant in the Sobolev embeddings. Along the way, we prove an important estimate concerning concentration phenomenas when $f$ is a non-constant function.