A characterization of the eigenvalues of a completely continuous selfadjoint operator
In this paper, two deformation lemmas concerning a family of indefinite, non necessarily continuously differentiable functionals are proved. A critical point theorem, which extends the classical result of Benci-Rabinowitz [14, Theorem 5.29] to the above-mentioned setting, is then deduced.
The first motivation for this note is to obtain a general version of the following result: let E be a Banach space and f : E → R be a differentiable function, bounded below and satisfying the Palais-Smale condition; then, f is coercive, i.e., f(x) goes to infinity as ||x|| goes to infinity. In recent years, many variants and extensions of this result appeared, see [3], [5], [6], [9], [14], [18], [19] and the references therein. A general result of this type was given in [3, Theorem 5.1] for a lower...