Mountain Pass solutions for non-local elliptic operators

The purpose of this paper is to study the existence of solutions for equations driven by a non-local integrodifferential operator with homogeneous Dirichlet boundary conditions. These equations have a variational structure and we find a non-trivial solution for them using the Mountain Pass Theorem. To make the nonlinear methods work, some careful analysis of the fractional spaces involved is necessary. We prove this result for a general integrodifferential operator of fractional type and, as a particular case, we derive an existence theorem for the fractional Laplacian, finding non-trivial solutions of the equation {(-Delta)(s)u = f (x, u) in Omega, u = 0 in R-n \Omega. As far as we know, all these results are new. (C) 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.