Existence results for a borderline case of a class of p-Laplacian problems

The aim of this paper is investigating the existence of at least one nontrivial bounded solution of the new asymptotically ``linear'' problem \[ \left\{ \begin{array}{ll} - \divg \left[\left(A_0(x) + A(x) |u|^{ps}\right) |\nabla u|^{p-2} \nabla u\right] + s\ A(x) |u|^{ps-2} u\ |\nabla u|^p &\\[5pt] \qquad\qquad\qquad =\ \mu |u|^{p (s + 1) -2} u + g(x,u) & \hbox{in $\Omega$,}\\[10pt] u = 0 & \hbox{on $\bdry{\Omega}$,} \end{array}\right. \] where $\Omega$ is a bounded domain in $\R^N$, $N \ge 2$, $1 < p < N$, $s > 1/p$, both the coefficients $A_0(x)$ and $A(x)$ are in $L^\infty(\Omega)$ and far away from 0, $\mu \in \R$, and the ``perturbation'' term $g(x,t)$ is a Carath\'{e}odory function on $\Omega \times \R$ which grows as $|t|^{r-1}$ with $1\le r < p (s + 1)$ and is such that $g(x,t) \approx \nu |t|^{p-2} t$ as $t \to 0$. By introducing suitable thresholds for the parameters $\nu$ and $\mu$, which are related to the coefficients $A_0(x)$, respectively $A(x)$, under suitable hypotheses on $g(x,t)$, the existence of a nontrivial weak solution is proved if either $\nu$ is large enough with $\mu$ small enough or $\nu$ is small enough with $\mu$ large enough. Variational methods are used and in the first case a minimization argument applies while in the second case a suitable Mountain Pass Theorem is used.