On the orbital stability of solitary waves for the fourth order nonlinear Schr\"odinger equation

TL;DR

This paper investigates the orbital stability of solitary waves in a fourth-order nonlinear Schrödinger equation with mixed dispersion, identifying a stability threshold related to the nonlinear term's power through analytical and numerical methods.

Contribution

It introduces a numerical approach to construct a smooth curve of solitary waves, enabling the determination of a stability threshold for the nonlinear term's power, which differs from classical cases.

Findings

Existence of explicit solitary wave solutions with hyperbolic secant profile.

Identification of a stability threshold power α₀ ≈ 4.8 for the nonlinear term.

Numerical construction of a smooth curve of solitary waves to analyze stability.

Abstract

In this paper, we present new results regarding the orbital stability of solitary standing waves for the general fourth-order Schr\"odinger equation with mixed dispersion. The existence of solitary waves can be determined both as minimizers of a constrained complex functional and by using a numerical approach. In addition, for specific values of the frequency associated with the standing wave, one obtains explicit solutions with a hyperbolic secant profile. Despite these explicit solutions being minimizers of the constrained functional, they cannot be seen as a smooth curve of solitary waves, and this fact prevents their determination of stability using classical approaches in the current literature. To overcome this difficulty, we employ a numerical approach to construct a smooth curve of solitary waves. The existence of a smooth curve is useful for showing the existence of a threshold power $\alpha_0\approx 4.8$ of the nonlinear term such that if $\alpha\in (0,\alpha_0),$ the explicit solitary wave is stable, and if $\alpha>\alpha_0$, the wave is unstable. An important feature of our work, caused by the presence of the mixed dispersion term, concerns the fact that the threshold value $\alpha_0 \approx 4.8$ is not the same as that established for proving the existence of global solutions in the energy space, as is well known for the classical nonlinear Schr\"odinger equation.