Compactness and existence results in weighted Sobolev spaces of radial functions, Part I: Compactness

Given two measurable functions $V(r)\geq 0$ and $K(r)> 0$, $r>0$, we define the weighted spaces \[ H_V^1 = \{u \in D^{1,2}(\mathbb{R}^N): \int_{\mathbb{R}^N}V(|x|)u^{2}dx < \infty \}, \quad L_K^q = L^q(\mathbb{R}^N,K(|x|)dx) \] and study the compact embeddings of the radial subspace of $H_V^1$ into $L_K^{q_1}+L_K^{q_2}$, and thus into $L_K^q$ ($=L_K^q+L_K^q$) as a particular case. Both super- and sub-quadratic exponents $q_1$, $q_2$ and $q$ are considered. Our results do not require any compatibility between how the potentials $V$ and $K$ behave at the origin and at infinity, and essentially rely on power type estimates of their relative growth, not of the potentials separately. Applications to existence results for nonlinear elliptic problems like \[ -\triangle u + V(|x|)u = f(|x|,u) \quad \text{in}\mathbb{R}^N, \quad u \in H_V^1, \] will be given in a forthcoming paper.