Existence and instability of standing waves with prescribed norm for a class of Schrödinger-Poisson equations

Jacopo Bellazzini, Louis Jeanjean, Tingjian Luo

Published 2011-11-20, updated 2012-05-16Version 2

In this paper we study the existence and the instability of standing waves with prescribed $L^2$-norm for a class of Schr\"odinger-Poisson-Slater equations in $\R^{3}$ %orbitally stable standing waves with arbitray charge for the following Schr\"odinger-Poisson type equation \label{evolution1} i\psi_{t}+ \Delta \psi - (|x|^{-1}*|\psi|^{2}) \psi+|\psi|^{p-2}\psi=0 % \text{in} \R^{3}, when $p \in (10/3,6)$. To obtain such solutions we look to critical points of the energy functional $$F(u)=1/2| \triangledown u|_{L^{2}(\mathbb{R}^3)}^2+1/4\int_{\mathbb{R}^3}\int_{\mathbb{R}^3}\frac{|u(x)|^2| u(y)|^2}{|x-y|}dxdy-\frac{1}{p}\int_{\mathbb{R}^3}|u|^pdx $$ on the constraints given by $$S(c)= \{u \in H^1(\mathbb{R}^3) :|u|_{L^2(\R^3)}^2=c, c>0}.$$ For the values $p \in (10/3, 6)$ considered, the functional $F$ is unbounded from below on $S(c)$ and the existence of critical points is obtained by a mountain pass argument developed on $S(c)$. We show that critical points exist provided that $c>0$ is sufficiently small and that when $c>0$ is not small a non-existence result is expected. Concerning the dynamics we show for initial condition $u_0\in H^1(\R^3)$ of the associated Cauchy problem with $|u_0|_{2}^2=c$ that the mountain pass energy level $\gamma(c)$ gives a threshold for global existence. Also the strong instability of standing waves at the mountain pass energy level is proved. Finally we draw a comparison between the Schr\"odinger-Poisson-Slater equation and the classical nonlinear Schr\"odinger equation.