Unilateral Global Bifurcation from Intervals for Fourth-Order Problems and Its Applications

Abstract

We establish a unilateral global bifurcation result from interval for a class of fourth-order problems with nondifferentiable nonlinearity. By applying the above result, we firstly establish the spectrum for a class of half-linear fourth-order eigenvalue problems. Moreover, we also investigate the existence of nodal solutions for the following half-linear fourth-order problems: x″″=αx++βx-+ratfx, 00, for s≠0. We give the intervals for the parameter r which ensure the existence of nodal solutions for the above fourth-order half-linear problems if f0∈[0,∞) or f∞∈[0,∞], where f0=lims→0f(s)/s and f∞=lims→+∞f(s)/s. We use the unilateral global bifurcation techniques and the approximation of connected components to prove our main results.