Existence of positive solutions to quasi-linear elliptic equations with exponential growth in the whole Euclidean space

In this paper a quasi-linear elliptic equation in the whole Euclidean space is considered. The nonlinearity of the equation is assumed to have exponential growth or have critical growth in view of Trudinger–Moser type inequality. Under some assumptions on the potential and the nonlinearity, it is proved that there is a nontrivial positive weak solution to this equation. Also it is shown that there are two distinct positive weak solutions to a perturbation of the equation. The method of proving these results is combining Trudinger– Moser type inequality, Mountain-pass theorem and Ekeland’s variational principle. © 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.