Existence and properties of travelling waves for the Gross-Pitaevskii equation

Fabrice Béthuel, Philippe Gravejat, Jean-Claude Saut

Published 2009-02-22Version 1

This paper presents recent results concerning the existence and qualitative properties of travelling wave solutions to the Gross-Pitaevskii equation posed on the whole space R^N. Unlike the defocusing nonlinear Schr\"odinger equations with null condition at infinity, the presence of non-zero conditions at infinity yields a rather rich and delicate dynamics. We focus on the case N = 2 and N = 3, and also briefly review some classical results on the one-dimensional case. The works we survey provide rigorous justifications to the impressive series of results which Jones, Putterman and Roberts established by formal and numerical arguments.