On dipolar quantum gases in the unstable regime

TL;DR

This paper investigates the existence, stability, and instability of standing waves in dipolar Bose-Einstein condensates modeled by a nonlinear Schrödinger equation, revealing how trapping potentials influence system stability and scattering behavior.

Contribution

It provides new insights into the stability properties of standing waves in dipolar quantum gases, especially showing how trapping potentials can stabilize otherwise unstable states.

Findings

Existence of ground and excited states with different stability properties.

Trapping potential stabilizes certain states and creates a gap in the energy spectrum.

Small data in the free case scatter, but trapping potential prevents scattering for small norm states.

Abstract

We study the nonlinear Schr\"odinger equation arising in dipolar Bose-Einstein condensate in the unstable regime. Two cases are studied: the first when the system is free, the second when gradually a trapping potential is added. In both cases we first focus on the existence and stability/ instability properties of standing waves. Our approach leads to the search of critical points of a constrained functional which is unbounded from below on the constraint. In the free case, by showing that the constrained functional has a so-called {\it mountain pass geometry}, we prove the existence of standing states with least energy, the ground states, and show that any ground state is orbitally unstable. Moreover, when the system is free, we show that small data in the energy space scatter in all regimes, stable and unstable. In the second case, if the trapping potential is small, we prove that two different kind of standing waves appears: one corresponds to a {\it topological local minimizer} of the constrained energy functional and it consists in ground states, the other is again of {\it mountain pass type} but now corresponds to excited states. We also prove that any ground state is a {\it topological local minimizer}. Despite the problem is mass supercritical and the functional unbounded from below, the standing waves associated to the set of ground states turn to be orbitally stable. Actually, from the physical point of view, the introduction of the trapping potential stabilizes the system initially unstable. Related to this we observe that it also creates a gap in the ground state energy level of the system. In addition when the trapping potential is active the presence of standing waves with arbitrary small norm does not permit small data scattering. Eventually some asymptotic results are also given.