Standing waves for a coupled system of nonlinear Schrödinger equations (Q2255371)

The paper deals with the system \[ \begin{cases} &-\varepsilon^2\Delta u +a(x) u=f(u)+\lambda v,\\ &-\varepsilon^2\Delta v +b(x) v=g(v)+\lambda u,\\ &u, v>0,\;u, v\in H^1(\mathbb{R}^N), \end{cases} \] with \(N\geq 3\), \(\varepsilon,\lambda>0\), and \(a, b, f, g\) continuous. It is required that \(\inf a, \inf b>\lambda\). The nonlinearities \(f,g\) are subcritical, one of \(f,g\) is superlinear. For \(x\in\mathbb{R}^N\) let \(m(x,\lambda)\) be the energy of the ground state solution of the system \[ \begin{cases} &-\varepsilon^2\Delta u +\alpha_1 u=f(u)+\lambda v,\\ &-\varepsilon^2\Delta v +\alpha_2 v=g(v)+\lambda u,\\ &u, v \in H^1 (\mathbb{R}^N), \end{cases}\tag{1} \] with ``frozen coefficients'' \(\alpha_1=a(x)\), \(\beta_1= b(x)\). The main theorem of the paper states the existence of a solution of (1) for \(\varepsilon,\lambda>0\) small provided the function \(m(x,\lambda)\) satisfies a certain geometric condition. Essentially \(m(\cdot,\lambda)\) should have a minimum in the interior of an open set \(\mathcal{O}\subset\mathbb{R}^N\), uniformly for \(\lambda>0\) small. The theorem also contains detailed information on the shape of the solution as \(\varepsilon\to 0\) or \(\lambda\to 0\). The proof is based on variational methods.