Stability of the Caffarelli-Kohn-Nirenberg inequality: the existence of minimizers

In this paper, we consider the following variational problem: \begin{eqnarray*} \inf_{u\in D^{1,2}a(\bbr^N)\backslash$\mathcal{Z}$}\frac{|u|^2{D^{1,2}a(\bbr^N)}-C{a,b,N}^{-1}|u|^2_{L^{p+1}(|x|^{-b(p+1)},\bbr^N)}}{dist_{D^{1,2}{a}}^2(u, $\mathcal{Z}$)}:=c{BE}, \end{eqnarray*} where $N\ge 2$, $b_{FS}(a)<b<a+1$ for $a<0$ and $a\le b<a+1$ for $0\le a<a_c:=\frac{N-2}{2}$ and $a+b>0$ with $b_{FS}(a)$ being the Felli-Schneider curve, $p=\frac{N+2(1+a-b)}{N-2(1+a-b)}$, $\mathcal{Z}=\{c{\tau }^{a_c-a}W(\tau x)\mid c\in \text{bbr}\mathrm{\backslash }\{0\},\tau >0\}$ and up to dilations and scalar multiplications, $W(x)$, which is positive and radially symmetric, is the unique extremal function of the following classical Caffarelli-Kohn-Nirenberg (CKN for short) inequality \begin{eqnarray*} \bigg(\int_{\bbr^N}|x|^{-b(p+1)}|u|^{p+1}dx\bigg)^{\frac{2}{p+1}}\leq C_{a,b,N}\int_{\bbr^N}|x|^{-2a}|\nabla u|^2dx \end{eqnarray*} with $C_{a,b,N}$ being the optimal constant. It is known in \cite{WW2022} that $c_{BE}>0$. In this paper, we prove that the above variational problem has a minimizer for $N\ge 2$ under the following two assumptions: \begin{enumerate} \item[$(i)$]\quad $a_c^{\ast }\le a<a_c$ and $a\le b<a+1$, \item[$(ii)$]\quad $a<a_c^{\ast }$ and $b_{FS}^{\ast }(a)\le b<a+1$, \end{enumerate} where $a_c^{\ast }=(1-\sqrt{\frac{N-1}{2N}})a_c$ and \begin{eqnarray*} b_{FS}^(a)=\frac{(a_c-a)N}{a_c-a+\sqrt{(a_c-a)^2+N-1}}+a-a_c. \end{eqnarray} Our results extend that of Konig in \cite{K2023} for the Sobolev inequality to the CKN inequality. Moreover, we believe that our assumptions~$(i)$ and $(ii)$ are optimal for the existence of minimizers of the above variational problem.