Elliptic Equations and Systems with Subcritical and Critical Exponential Growth Without the Ambrosetti–Rabinowitz Condition

In this paper, we prove the existence of nontrivial nonnegative solutions to a class of elliptic equations and systems which do not satisfy the Ambrosetti– Rabinowitz (AR) condition where the nonlinear terms are superlinear at 0 and of subcritical or critical exponential growth at ∞. The known results without the AR condition in the literature only involve nonlinear terms of polynomial growth. We will use suitable versions of the Mountain Pass Theorem and Linking Theorem introduced by Cerami (Istit. Lombardo Accad. Sci. Lett. Rend. A, 112(2):332–336, 1978 Ann. Mat. Pura Appl., 124:161–179, 1980). The Moser–Trudinger inequality plays an important role in establishing our results. Our theorems extend the results of de Figueiredo, Miyagaki, and Ruf (Calc. Var. Partial Differ. Equ., 3(2):139–153, 1995) and of de Figueiredo, do Ó, and Ruf (Indiana Univ. Math. J., 53(4):1037–1054, 2004) to the case where the nonlinear term does not satisfy the AR condition. Examples of such nonlinear terms are given in Appendix A. Thus, we have established the existence of nontrivial nonnegative solutions for a wider class of nonlinear terms.