Existence and Stability Properties of Radial Bound States for Schr\"odinger-Poisson with an External Coulomb Potential in Three Space Dimensions

TL;DR

This paper investigates the existence, bifurcation, and stability of radial bound states in a Schr"odinger-Poisson system with Coulomb-like external potential, revealing infinitely many solutions with varying stability properties.

Contribution

It demonstrates the bifurcation of infinitely many radial solutions from the linear problem and analyzes their stability, including numerical approximations and asymptotic behavior.

Findings

Infinitely many critical points bifurcate from the linear problem at zero mass.

Ground state is orbitally stable; excited states become unstable at large mass.

Numerical solutions extend to large mass, approaching no-potential solutions.

Abstract

We consider radial solutions to the Schr\"odinger-Poisson system in three dimensions with an external smooth potential with Coulomb-like decay. Such a system can be viewed as a model for the interaction of dark matter with a bright matter background in the non-relativistic limit. We find that there are infinitely many critical points of the Hamiltonian, subject to fixed mass, and that these bifurcate from solutions to the associated linear problem at zero mass. As a result, each branch has a different topological character defined by the number of zeros of the radial states. We construct numerical approximations to these nonlinear states along the first several branches. The solution branches can be continued, numerically, to large mass values, where they become asymptotic, under a rescaling, to those of the Schr\"odinger-Poisson problem with no external potential. Our numerical computations indicate that the ground state is orbitally stable, while the excited states are linearly unstable for sufficiently large mass.