Existence and Stability of Standing Waves for the Inhomogeneous Schrödinger Equations with Mixed Fractional Laplacians ()
1. Introduction
This article focuses on studying the existence and orbital stability of standing waves for the inhomogeneous Schrödinger equations with mixed fractional Laplacians
(1.1)
where
is the complex valued function with
,
,
,
, and
. The fractional Laplacian
is characterized as
for
, where
is the Fourier transform.
In recent years, the fractional Schrödinger equation has attracted widespread attention. Motivated by a variety of applications, remarkable progress has been achieved, as can be seen in [1]-[14]. Laskin initially introduced the fractional Schrödinger equation in [15] [16]. During the early research on this equation, the focus was mainly on the Hartree-type nonlinearity
, as shown in [17]-[20]. However, regarding the local nonlinearity
, the authors in [21] [22] investigated the well-posedness and ill-posedness in Sobolev space
. Recently, Boulenger et al. established the sufficient conditions for the blow-up in finite time of radial solutions in
in [23]. Nevertheless, for the mixed fractional inhomogeneous Schrödinger equation, as mentioned in [24] [25], there are currently very limited known results.
Equation (1.1) significantly broadens the application scope compared to equations with a single fractional Laplacian operator. It can describe a wider spectrum of physical scenarios. For example, the combination of fractional Laplacian operators of different orders can be used to depict the motion and interactions of particles in non-uniform media within special quantum-mechanical systems. Moreover, from a practical application perspective, Equation (1.1) has potential value in various fields. In population dynamics, for instance, the nonlinearity
in Equation (1.1), analogous to the interaction patterns among population individuals, is vital for studying population distribution and evolution, as reported in references [26] [27]. For Equation (1.1) with
, the authors derived the existence and dynamics of solutions in mass-critical and supercritical cases by using the mountain pass lemma in [24]. In addition, the authors employed the constrained variational approaches to give a complete description of the existence of the normalized solution in [25], and this study addressed the mass-subcritical, critical and supercritical cases. However, there had been very little research on the situation when
before. In this paper, we consider the case of
for Equation (1.1). Moreover, in terms of research methods, this paper makes improvements on the deficiencies of predecessors in dealing with the non-locality of the fractional Laplacian operator and the nonlinearity
. In the proof of the existence of solutions, the application mode of the concentration-compactness principle is optimized to make it more suitable for this equation. In addition, based on the applicability of the current theory and in order to obtain clearer research results, this paper only studies the properties in the mass-subcritical case. Equation (1.1) admits a class of special solutions, which are called standing waves, namely solutions of the form
, where
is a frequency and
is a nontrivial solution to the elliptic equation
(1.2)
Equation (1.2) is variational, whose action functional is defined by
(1.3)
where the corresponding energy
is defined by
(1.4)
It is interesting to study solutions of (1.2) having prescribed
-norm. That is, for any given constant
, consider solutions of (1.2) with the
-norm constraint
(1.5)
Physically, such solution is called normalized solution to (1.2). In this case, the frequency
is determined as Lagrange multiplier associated with
and is unknown.
For Equation (1.1), one of important problems is to consider the stability of standing waves, which is defined as follows.
Definition 1.1. The set
is orbitally stable if for any given
, there exists
such that for any data
satisfying
the corresponding solution
of (1.2) satisfies
for any
.
In the
-subcritical case, i.e.,
, by using the Gagliardo-Nirenberg inequality (2.3), we find that
restricted to
is bounded from below for any
. Therefore, we consider the following constrained minimization problem
(1.6)
In this case, we prove the existence of the solution to variational problem (1.6) by using the concentration compactness principle. However, compared with the work in [24] [25], one of the main difficulties is that due to the inhomogeneous nonlinearity
, Equation (1.1) does not possess translational invariance. In order to overcome the difficulties, we prove the boundedness of any translation sequence by using a similar argument in [19]. Denote the set of all minimizers of (1.6) by
(1.7)
It is standard that for any
, there exists a
such that
solves Equation (1.2), and
is a standing wave solution of (1.1) with the initial data
.
Theorem 1.2. Let
,
,
,
, and
. Then the minimizing problem (1.6) has a positive normalized solution
, and it satisfies (1.2) for some
.
In view of Definition 1.1, in order to study the stability, we require that the solution of (1.1) exists globally, at least for initial data
sufficiently close to
. In fact, in the
-subcritical case, all solutions for the nonlinear Schrödinger Equation (1.1) exist globally. Therefore, we can obtain that if the initial value is close to an orbit in the set
, then the solution of (1.1) remains close to the orbit in the set
. Our main results are as follows:
Theorem 1.3. Let
,
,
, and
. Then, the
is orbitally stable.
Notation. For any
, the definition of the fractional order Sobolev space
is as follows
endowed with the norm
where,
is the so-called Gagliardo semi-norm of
. We use
to denote the subspace of
, consisting of radially symmetric functions in
. In this paper, we often use the abbreviation
,
.
2. Preliminaries
In this section, we recall some preliminary results that will be used later. Firstly, we recall the local well-posedness for the Cauchy problem (1.1), which can be proved by using the methods in [24], and the process is standard.
Lemma 2.1. Let
,
,
, and
. Then, for any
, there exists a constant
and a unique maximal solution
to the problem (1.1) which satisfies the alternative: either
or
and
as
. In addition, the solution
satisfies the following conservations of mass and energy
(2.1)
and
(2.2)
for all
, where
is defined by (1.4).
Next, we display the Gagliardo-Nirenberg inequality in
.
Lemma 2.2. ([28]) Let
,
,
, and
, then
(2.3)
where
denotes the optimal constant, and
moreover,
is the solution of the following equation:
Furthermore, we present an estimate of the nonlinear term.
Lemma 2.3. Let
,
. if
, then
(2.4)
and
(2.5)
where
and
.
Proof. We deduce from Hölder’s inequality that
where
. When
, we choose
, then (2.4) holds. In addition, by the Sobolev inequality, we have
↪
, where
, thus (2.5) holds.
□
We cite the concentration-compactness principle of [29], but we need to operate some modifications due to the difference of the parameters.
Lemma 2.4. ([29]) Let
. Suppose
and satisfy
(2.6)
(2.7)
Then there exists a subsequence
, for which one of the following properties holds.
i) Compactness: There exists a sequence
in
such that, for any
, there exist
with
(2.8)
ii) Vanishing: For all
, it follows that
(2.9)
iii) Dichotomy: There exists a constant
and two bounded sequences
such that
(2.10)
(2.11)
(2.12)
(2.13)
(2.14)
Finally, we present another version of the vanishing proved in [30].
Lemma 2.5. ([30]) Let
. Assume that
is bounded in
, and that it satisfies
where
. Then
in
for
.
3. Orbital Stability of Standing Waves
In this section, we study the existence and stability of standing waves to (1.1) in the mass-subcritical case.
Proof of Theorem 1.2. We proceed in four steps.
Step 1. Prove that the variational problem (1.6) is well-defined, and there exists a positive constant
such that
. We deduce from the Lemma 2.2 and Young’s inequality that there exists a constant
such that for any
, the following inequalities hold:
(3.1)
where
. This result implies that
, which indicates that the variational problem (1.6) is well-defined.
On the other hand, it is evident that
. Let
and
. Define
for
. Through straightforward calculations, we obtain
and
(3.2)
Since
, when
is small enough, we can deduce that
. Thus, there exists a positive constant
such that
.
Step 2. Estimates of the minimizing sequence
for (1.6). Since
, the sequence
is bounded in
. As can be observed from (3.1),
. Therefore,
is bounded in
. Moreover, given that
, we obtain
for
large enough. From this, we can further deduce that
(3.3)
Step 3. We show that the vanishing and dichotomy cases do not occur. Let
be a minimizing sequence of (1.6). Note that through scaling operations, we can assume
. Obviously,
is also a minimizing sequence of (1.6). Thus, without loss of generality, we may suppose that
is nonnegative. We now apply Lemma 2.4 to the minimizing sequence
.
Firstly, we claim that vanishing cannot occur. Indeed, if not, applying Lemma 2.5, we have
in
, and combined with Lemma 2.3, we can get that
which is a contradiction with (3.3).
Next, we show dichotomy cannot occur. If not, there exist a constant
and two sequences
and
which are introduced in Lemma 2.4. It follows from (2.13) and (2.14) that
Hence,
(3.4)
On the other hand, given
and
, we have
Applying the above inequality with
and
, and since
, we obtain that
(3.5)
Similarly,
(3.6)
with
, and so
Note that
and
by (2.12). It follows from
that
Therefore, using (2.11) and (3.3) we deduce that
which contradicts (3.4).
Finally, since we have ruled out both vanishing and dichotomy, we conclude that indeed compactness occurs. Applying Lemma 2.4, we deduce that there exists a subsequence
and a sequence
such that, for any
, there exist
with
Let
. Since
is a radially bounded sequence in
, the embedding
↪
is compact for any
and
. Hence, there exists
such that
in
, thus,
in
. Therefore, we obtain
this implies , i.e.,
in
. By Sobolev Embedding Theorem,
(3.7)
Step 4. Conclusion. We first prove that the sequence
is bounded. Indeed, for the sake of contradiction, that it is unbounded. Then, passing to a subsequence if necessary, we can assume that
as
. Consequently, from (3.7), we deduce that
This leads to the following inequality
By the definition of
, we obtain
which implies
. However, since
, we know that
. This is a contradiction. Thus, the sequence
is bounded. Then, there exists some
such that
as
. We
consequently deduce from (3.7) that for all
as
. Let
, then
. Combining this with the week lower semicontinuity of the
-norm, this implies
According to the definition of
, we conclude that
. In particular, since
, it follows that
This implies that
in
as
, and thus the proof is complete.
□
Remark 3.1. When
, we can obtain the global existence of (1.1)
by using (2.1), (2.2) and (2.3). Indeed, we have that
It follows that
if
, which implies that
.
Proof of Theorem 1.3.
We prove this theorem by contradiction. According to Remark 3.1, if
,
, and
, then the solution
of (1.1) exists globally and
is bounded. Assume that exist
and a sequence
such that
(3.8)
and there exists a sequence
such that the relevant solution sequence
of (1.2) satisfies
(3.9)
It follows from (3.8) and the conservation laws that as
and
Therefore,
is a minimizing sequence of the variational problem (1.6). According to Theorem 1.2, we deduce that there exists a minimizer
such that as
(3.10)
which contradicts with (3.9). This completes the proof.
□