Bounded Palais-Smale sequences for non-differentiable functions

The existence of bounded Palais-Smale sequences (briefly BPS) for functionals depending on a parameter belonging to a real interval and which are the sum of a locally Lipschitz continuous term and of a convex, proper, lower semicontinuous function, is obtained when the parameter runs in a full measure subset of the given interval. Specifically, for this class of non-smooth functions, we obtain BPS related to mountain pass and to global infima levels. This is done by developing a unifying approach, which applies to both cases and relies on a suitable deformation lemma. © 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.