Abstract. In this paper, we investigate the constrained minimization problem e(a) := infwhere the energy functionalwith m ∈ R, a > 0, is defined on a Sobolev space H. We show that there exists a threshold a * > 0 so that e(a) is achieved if 0 < a < a * , and has no minimizers if a ≥ a * . We also investigate the asymptotic behavior of nonnegative minimizers of e(a) as a → a * .