The existence of multi-peak positive solutions for nonlinear Kirchhoff equations

Abstract

In this work, we study the following Kirchhoff equation $$\begin{cases}-\left(\varepsilon^2 a+\varepsilon b\int_{\mathbb R^3}|\nabla u|^2\right)\Delta u +u =Q(x)u^{q-1},\quad u>0,\quad x\in {\mathbb{R}^{3}},\\u\to 0,\quad \text{as}\ |x|\to +\infty,\end{cases}$$ where $a,b>0$ are constants, $2<q<6$, and $\varepsilon>0$ is a parameter. Under some suitable assumptions on the function $Q(x)$, we obtain that the equation above has positive multi-peak solutions concentrating at a critical point of $Q(x)$ for $\varepsilon>0$ sufficiently small, by using the Lyapunov-Schmidt reduction method. We extend the result in (Discrete Contin. Dynam. Systems 6(2000), 39--50) to the nonlinear Kirchhoff equation.