Ground states of two-component attractive Bose-Einstein condensates. I: Existence and uniqueness (Q1626422)

The paper is devoted to studying the nonnegative minimizers of the following \(L^2\)-critical constraint variational problem \[ e(a_1,a_2,\beta):=\inf_{(u_1,u_2)\in \mathcal{M}} E_{a_1,a_2,\beta}(u_1,u_2),\,\;a_1>0,\,\;a_2>0,\,\;\beta>0, \tag{1} \] \[ \mathcal{M}:=\Big\{(u_1,u_2)\in \mathcal{X}:\, \int_{\mathbb{R} ^2}(|u_1|^2+|u_2|^2 )\,dx=1\Big\}, \] \[ \begin{multlined} E_{a_1,a_2,\beta}(u_1,u_2) =\int_{\mathbb{R} ^2} \big(|\nabla u_1|^2+|\nabla u_2|^2\big)\,dx +\int_{\mathbb{R} ^2}\big( V_1(x)|u_1|^2+V_2(x)|u_2|^2\big) \,dx \\ -\int_{\mathbb{R} ^2} \Big(\frac{a_1}{2}|u_1|^4+\frac{a_2}{2}|u_2|^4 +\beta |u_1|^2|u_2|^2\Big) \,dx \,,\quad (u_1,u_2)\in\mathcal{X}. \end{multlined}\tag{2} \] The assumptions are as follows: \(a_1>0\), \(a_2>0\), \(\beta >0\), \(0\leq V_i(x)\in C^\alpha_{\text{loc}}(\mathbb{R}^2)\), \(0<\alpha<1\), and \[ \lim_{|x|\to\infty} V_i(x) = \infty, \text{ both } \inf_{x\in\mathbb{R}^2}V_i(x)=0 \text{ and }\inf_{x\in \mathbb{R}^2} \big(V_1(x)+V_2(x)\big) \text{ are attained.} \tag{3} \] In the paper, the existence and non-existence of minimizers are completely classified. The uniqueness and symmetry-breaking of ground states are also analyzed, under different types of trapping potentials as \(\beta \nearrow \beta ^*=a^*+\sqrt{(a^*-a_1)(a^*-a_2)}\), where \(0<a_i<a^*:=\|w\|^2_2\) (\(i=1,2\)) are fixed and \(w\) is the unique positive solution to \[ \Delta w-w+w^3=0,\,\,\;w \in H^1(\mathbb{R}^2). \tag{4} \]