Existence of many sign-changing nonradial solutions for semilinear elliptic problems on thin annuli

Abstract

We study the existence of many nonradial sign-changing solutions of a superlinear Dirichlet boundary value problem in an annulus in $\mathbb R^N$. We use Nehari-type variational method and group invariance techniques to prove that the critical points of an action functional on some spaces of invariant functions in $H_{0}^{1,2}(\Omega_{\varepsilon})$, where $\Omega_{\varepsilon}$ is an annulus in $\mathbb R^N$ of width $\varepsilon$, are weak solutions (which in our case are also classical solutions) to our problem. Our result generalizes an earlier result of Castro et al. (See [A. Castro, J. Cossio and J. M. Neuberger, A minmax principle, index of the critical point, and existence of sign-changing solutions to elliptic boundary value problems, Electron. J. Differential Equations 2 (1998), 1–18]).