Asymptotic behavior for the Brezis-Nirenberg problem. The subcritical perturbation case

Abstract: In this paper, we are concerned with the well-known Brezis-Nirenberg problem \begin{equation*} \begin{cases} -\Delta u= u^{2^*-1}+\varepsilon u^{q-1},\quad u>0, &{\text{in}~\Omega},\ \quad \ \ u=0, &{\text{on}~\partial \Omega}, \end{cases} \end{equation*} where $\Omega\subset \mathbb R^N$ with $N\ge 3$ is a bounded domain, $q\in(2,2^*)$ and $2^*=\frac{2N}{N-2}$ denotes the critical Sobolev exponent. It is well-known (H. Br\'{e}zis and L. Nirenberg, \newblock {\em Comm. Pure Appl. Math.}, 36(4):437--477, 1983) that the above problem admits a positive least energy solution for all $\varepsilon >0$ and $q>\max{2,\frac{4}{N-2}}$. In the present paper, we first analyze the asymptotic behavior of the positive least energy solution as $\varepsilon\to 0$ and establish a sharp asymptotic characterisation of the profile and blow-up rate of the least energy solution. Then, we prove the uniqueness and nondegeneracy of the least energy solution under some mild assumptions on domain $\Omega$. The main results in this paper can be viewed as a generalization of the results for $q=2$ previously established in the literature. But the situation is quite different from the case $q=2$, and the blow-up rate not only heavily depends on the space dimension $N$ and the geometry of the domain $\Omega$, but also depends on the exponent $q\in(\max{2,\frac{4}{N-2}}, 2^*)$ in a non-trivial way.