ON DIPOLAR QUANTUM GASES IN THE UNSTABLE REGIME

We study the nonlinear Schrodinger equation arising in dipolar Bose-Einstein condensate in the unstable regime. Two cases are studied: the first when the system is free, the second when gradually a trapping potential is added. In both cases we first focus on the existence and stability/instability properties of standing waves. Our approach leads to the search of critical points of a constrained functional which is unbounded from below on the constraint. In the free case, by showing that the constrained functional has a so-called mountain pass geometry, we prove the existence of standing states with least energy, the ground states, and show that any ground state is orbitally unstable. Moreover, when the system is free, we show that small data in the energy space scatter in all regimes, stable and unstable. In the second case, if the trapping potential is small, we prove that two different kinds of standing waves appear: one corresponds to a topological local minimizer of the constrained energy functional and consists in ground states, and the other is again of mountain pass type but now corresponds to excited states. We also prove that any ground state is a topological local minimizer. Despite the problem being mass supercritical and the functional being unbounded from below, the standing waves associated to the set of ground states turn out to be orbitally stable. Actually, from the physical point of view, the introduction of the trapping potential stabilizes the system that is initially unstable. Related to this we observe that it also creates a gap in the ground state energy level of the system. In addition when the trapping potential is active the presence of standing waves with arbitrary small norm does not permit small data scattering. Eventually some asymptotic results are also given.