Towers of Nodal Bubbles for the Bahri–Coron Problem in Punctured Domains

Abstract

Let Ω be a bounded smooth domain in $\mathbb {R}^{N}$ which contains a ball of radius R centered at the origin, N ≥ 3. Under suitable symmetry assumptions, for each δ ∈ (0, R), we establish the existence of a sequence (um, δ) of nodal solutions to the critical problem $$\begin{align*}-\Delta u=|u|^{2^{\ast}-2}u\text{ in }\Omega_{\delta}:=\{x\in\Omega :\left\vert x\right\vert>\delta\},\quad u=0\text{ on }\partial \Omega_{\delta},\nonumber\end{align*}$$ where $2^{\ast }:=\frac {2N}{N-2}$ is the critical Sobolev exponent. We show that, if Ω is strictly star-shaped then, for each $m\in \mathbb {N},$ the solutions um, δ concentrate and blow up at 0, as $\delta \rightarrow 0,$ and their limit profile is a tower of nodal bubbles, that is, it is a sum of rescaled nonradial sign-changing solutions to the limit problem $$\begin{align*}-\Delta u=|u|^{2^{\ast}-2}u, \quad u\in D^{1,2}(\mathbb{R}^{N}),\nonumber\end{align*}$$ centered at the origin.