Ground-states for the liquid drop and TFDW models with long-range attraction

We prove that both the liquid drop model in R3 with an attractive background nucleus and the Thomas-Fermi-Dirac-von Weizsäcker (TFDW) model attain their ground-states for all masses as long as the external potential V(x) in these models is of long range, that is, it decays slower than Newtonian (e.g., V(x)≫|x|−1 for large |x|.) For the TFDW model, we adapt classical concentration-compactness arguments by Lions, whereas for the liquid drop model …