Infinitely many positive solutions of a Gross-Pitaevskii equation in the presence of a harmonic potential and combined nonlinearities

Yakine Bahri, Hichem Hajaiej

Published 2022-01-18, updated 2022-03-07Version 2

The main goal of this paper is to address an important conjecture in the field of differential equations in the presence of a harmonic potential. While in the subcritical case, the uniqueness of positive solution has been addressed by Hirose and Ohta in 2007, the problem has remained open for years in the supercritical case. In Hadj Selem et al., the authors obtained interesting numerical computations suggesting that for some bifurcating parameter $\lambda$, the equation has many positive solutions that vanish at infinity. In this paper, we provide a proof to this claim by constructing an accountable number of solutions that bifurcate from the unique singular solutions with $\lambda$ close to the first eigenvalue $\lambda_1$ of the harmonic operator $-\Delta + |x|^2$. Our method hinges on a matching argument, and applies to the supercritical case, and to the supercritical case in the presence of a subcritical, critical or supercritical perturbation.