Research projects

Project CEMAPRE internal

TitleGround States in DIspersive Systems
ParticipantsFilipe Oliveira (Principal Investigator)
SummaryThis project concerns the analysis of ground states for linearly and nonlinearly coupled nonlinear
Schrödinger systems in Rn. We focus on stationary solutions arising from a two-component NLS system
with linear coupling and cubic nonlinearities, which appear naturally in nonlinear optics and
Bose–Einstein condensates.

The main objective is to establish existence, nonexistence, and qualitative properties of ground
states, distinguishing between action ground states and energy ground states. A particular emphasis
is placed on low-dimensional cases, especially n=1, where standard compactness arguments based on
symmetric decreasing rearrangements fail in general Sobolev spaces.

Using variational methods on suitable constraint manifolds (notably the Nehari manifold and
fixed-mass manifolds), combined with rearrangement techniques in spaces of radially decreasing
functions, we prove the existence of positive action ground states for all dimensions under
appropriate assumptions on the coupling and nonlinear coefficients. The compact embedding of Sobolev
Spaces in Lp spaces ensured by Strauss-type lemmas, play a crucial role.

Furthermore, we investigate the relationship between action and energy minimization problems,
showing that in several cases energy ground states coincide with action ground states for suitable
frequencies. We also address nonexistence results in the critical dimension n=4, complementing known
results in the literature.