Critical double phase problems involving sandwich-type nonlinearities

Abstract: In this paper we study problems with critical and sandwich-type growth represented by \begin{equation*} -\operatorname{div}\Big(|\nabla u|^{p-2}\nabla u + a(x)|\nabla u|^{q-2}\nabla u\Big) = \lambda w(x)|u|^{s-2}u+\theta B\left(x,u\right) \quad\text{in } \Omega,\quad u = 0 \quad \text{on } \partial \Omega, \end{equation*} where $\Omega\subset\mathbb{R}^N$ is a bounded domain with Lipschitz boundary $\partial\Omega$, $1<p<s<q<N$, $\frac{q}{p}<1+\frac{1}{N}$, $0\leq a(\cdot)\in C^{0,1}(\overline{\Omega})$, $\lambda$, $\theta$ are real parameters, $w$ is a suitable weight and $B\colon \overline{\Omega}\times \mathbb{R}\to\mathbb{R}$ is given by \begin{align*} B(x,t) :=b_0(x)|t|^{p^-2}t+b(x)|t|^{q^-2}t, \end{align*} where $r^*:=Nr/(N-r)$ for $r\in{p,q}$. Here the right-hand side combines the effect of a critical term given by $B(\cdot,\cdot)$ and a sandwich-type perturbation with exponent $s \in (p,q)$. Under different values of the parameters $\lambda$ and $\theta$, we prove the existence and multiplicity of solutions to the problem above. For this, we mainly exploit different variational methods combined with topological tools, like a new concentration-compactness principle, a suitable truncation argument and the Krasnoselskii's genus theory, by considering very mild assumptions on the data $a(\cdot)$, $b_0(\cdot)$ and $b(\cdot)$.