Multiple positive bound states for the subcritical NLS equation on metric graphs (Q1628777)

The authors consider a noncompact metric graph \(\mathcal{G}\) which is a connected metric space obtained by gluing together, by the identification of some of their endpoints, a finite number of closed line intervals, according to the topology of a graph and the nonlinear Schrödinger (NLS) energy functional \(E(u,\mathcal{G})=\frac{1}{2}\left\| u^{\prime }\right\| _{L^{2}(\mathcal{G})}^{2}-\frac{1}{p}\left\| u\right\| _{L^{p}( \mathcal{G})}^{p}=\frac{1}{2}\int_{\mathcal{G}}\left| u^{\prime }\right| ^{2}dx-\frac{1}{p}\int_{\mathcal{G}}\left| u\right| ^{p}dx\). The purpose of the paper is to prove the existence of multiple bound states of this equation that is functions \(u\in H^{1}(\mathcal{G})\) which are critical points of the NLS energy functional and which are constrained by the mass \(\mu =\left\| u\right\| _{L^{2}(\mathcal{G} )}^{2}\). The main result of the paper indeed proves that if \(\mu \) is large enough, there exist at least as many bound states as the number of edges in \( \mathcal{G}\). Moreover the bound states are either positive or negative on \( \mathcal{G}\). For the proof, the authors first assume that the graph has a bounded edge. They consider a maximal edge \(e\) in \(\mathcal{G}\) and they introduce the set \(V_{\mu }=\{u\in H^{1}(\mathcal{G}):\left\| u\right\| _{L^{\infty }(e)}=\left\| u\right\| _{L^{\infty }( \mathcal{G})}\), \(\left\| u\right\| _{L^{2}(\mathcal{G})}^{2}=\mu \}\). They prove that the minimization problem \(E(u,\mathcal{G})=\min_{v\in V_{\mu }}E(v,\mathcal{G})\) has at least one solution \(u\in H_{\mu }^{1}(\mathcal{G}) \) if \(\mu \) is larger than some threshold \(\overline{\mu }\), analyzing the properties of a minimizing sequence. They finally prove that this minimizer is a bound state considering different possibilities for the edge. The paper ends with the description of four examples.