“…The existence of extremals in the TM-inequality was obtained by Carleson and Chang [10] for Ω = B 1 (0) ⊂ R 2 , by Flucher [23] for arbitrary bounded domains in R 2 , and by Lin [33] for bounded domains in R N ; de Figueiredo et al [19] gave an alternative proof and some generalization, using an optimal normalized concentrating sequence. For extensions of the TM-inequality to manifolds, see Cherrier [12], Fontana [25], Li [31,32], Yang [44]. Related elliptic equations with "critical" TM growth were considered by Adimurthi [3] and de Figueiredo et al [18], giving sufficient conditions on the lower order terms for the existence of solutions; in de Figueiredo and Ruf [21] the non-existence of radial solutions was proved for equations with critical TM-growth whose lower order term does not satisfy the above existence conditions.…”