Singular mean-field states: A brief review of recent results

TL;DR

This review discusses recent findings on singular mean-field states in nonlinear Schrödinger equations, highlighting stable states with density singularities and their counter-intuitive properties across different models and dimensions.

Contribution

It summarizes new results on stable singular states in GPE models with attractive potentials and nonlinearities, including their existence and stability properties across dimensions.

Findings

Stable singular ground states with integrable density singularities.

Existence of stable states even with reversed potential sign.

Singular solitons in various dimensions acting as ground states.

Abstract

This article provides a focused review of recent findings which demonstrate, in some cases quite counter-intuitively, the existence of bound states with a singularity of the density pattern at the center, while the states are physically meaningful because their total norm converges. One model of this type is based on the 2D Gross-Pitaevskii equation (GPE) which combines the attractive potential ~ 1/r^2 and the quartic self-repulsive nonlinearity, induced by the Lee-Huang-Yang effect (quantum fluctuations around the mean-field state). The GPE demonstrates suppression of the 2D quantum collapse, driven by the attractive potential, and emergence of a stable ground state (GS), whose density features an integrable singularity ~1/r^{4/3} at r --> 0. Modes with embedded angular momentum exist too, and they have their stability regions. A counter-intuitive peculiarity of the model is that the GS exists even if the sign of the potential is reversed from attraction to repulsion, provided that its strength is small enough. This peculiarity finds a relevant explanation. The other model outlined in the review includes 1D, 2D, and 3D GPEs, with the septimal (seventh-order), quintic, and cubic self-repulsive terms, respectively. These equations give rise to stable singular solitons, which represent the GS for each dimension D, with the density singularity ~1/r^{2/(4-D). Such states may be considered as a result of screening of a "bare" delta-functional attractive potential by the respective nonlinearity.