Stable directions for small nonlinear Dirac standing waves

TL;DR

This paper establishes decay estimates for linear Dirac operators and demonstrates the existence of stable directions for small nonlinear Dirac standing waves, marking the first such stability analysis for these equations.

Contribution

It provides the first mathematical analysis of stability for small nonlinear Dirac standing waves, using decay estimates and spectral analysis.

Findings

Propagation and dispersive estimates for Dirac operators.

Existence of stable directions tangent to the continuous spectrum.

First stability study of nonlinear Dirac equations.

Abstract

We prove that for a Dirac operator with no resonance at thresholds nor eigenvalue at thresholds the propagator satisfies propagation and dispersive estimates. When this linear operator has only two simple eigenvalues close enough, we study an associated class of nonlinear Dirac equations which have stationary solutions. As an application of our decay estimates, we show that these solutions have stable directions which are tangent to the subspaces associated with the continuous spectrum of the Dirac operator. This result is the analogue, in the Dirac case, of a theorem by Tsai and Yau about the Schr\"{o}dinger equation. To our knowledge, the present work is the first mathematical study of the stability problem for a nonlinear Dirac equation.