The Brezis-Nirenberg-type problem for critical cooperative and non-cooperative elliptic systems with general subcritical perturbations

Abstract: We study the Brezis--Nirenberg-type problem for a class of critical cooperative and non-cooperative elliptic systems with general subcritical perturbations. The system couples two equations through a matrix whose off-diagonal entries may be of either sign, a critical Sobolev-type nonlinearity, and a perturbation that may change sign.The main difficulties are threefold: the linear part is governed by a matrix, the critical nonlinearity couples the two components, and the perturbation is general and may change sign. We prove an abstract existence result under the energy threshold condition and verify this condition in two regimes. For $N\ge4$ the condition holds for every admissible triple, in both the unperturbed and the perturbed case; the proof uses a new $L<sup>{q}$ estimate for the normalized Aubin--Talenti functions, which controls the negative part of the perturbation. For $N=3$ the eficit in the Sobolev quotient is only of order $\eps<sup>{1/2}$, so a stronger linear threshold condition is required; we establish it explicitly for a ball and, for a general bounded smooth domain, in terms of an abstract constant from the classical Brezis--Nirenberg theory. We also establish the system Sobolev inequality with the same constant as in the scalar case. Since the unperturbed case is included, our results extend the classical theory to cooperative and non-cooperative critical systems with general lower-order perturbations.