Continuation and stability analysis for Bloch waves of the Gross-Pitaevskii equation (Q2413275)

The note is dedicated to two-parameter continuation algorithms for computing Bloch waves of Bose-Einstein condensates (BEC) in optical lattices, which are governed by the following Gross-Pitaevskii equation (GPE) \[ \begin{aligned} \mathbf{i}\frac{\partial \Psi }{\partial t}(\mathbf{x},t) = - \frac{1}{2}\Delta \Psi + V(\mathbf{x})\Psi + c\left| \Psi \right|^2\Psi ,\\ \displaystyle t > 0,\quad \mathbf{x} = (x,y) \in \Omega = (0,2\pi)^2. \end{aligned}\tag{1} \] Here, \(\Psi = \Psi (\mathbf{x},t)\) is the wave function of BEC, \(V(\mathbf{x}) = \nu (\cos x + \cos y)\) is the periodic trapping potential with positive constants \(\nu \) and \(c\). Substituting \(\Psi \left( {\mathbf{x},t} \right) = e^{ - \mathbf{i}\mu t}\psi (\mathbf{x})\) in (1) gives the 2D nonlinear eigenvalue problem \[ - \frac{1}{2}\Delta \psi (\mathbf{x}) + V(\mathbf{x})\psi (\mathbf{x}) + c\left| {\psi (\mathbf{x})} \right|^2\psi (\mathbf{x}) = \mu \psi (\mathbf{x}), \] where \(\mu \) is the chemical potential and \(\psi (\mathbf{x})\) is a complex stationary-state wave function. The Bloch waves are nonlinear eigenstates of the form \(\psi (\mathbf{x}) = e^{\mathbf{ik} \cdot \mathbf{x}}\varphi _{\mathbf{k}}(\mathbf{x})\), where \(\varphi _\mathbf{k} (\mathbf{x})\) is a complex periodic function of period \(2\pi \) and \(\mathbf{k} = \left( {k_x ,k_y } \right)\) is the Bloch wave vector with wave components \(k_x ,k_y \in [ - 1 / 2,\,\,1 / 2]\). The Fourier collocation method and fourth-order Adini's elements with penalty are used to discretize the GPE. This paper is organized as follows. Section 1 is an introduction. In Section 2, the FCM and the Adini element method with penalty are studied. In Section 3, linear stability analysis for the GPE (1) is discussed. It is shown numerically that, for certain values of the parameters \(c\), \(\nu \), \(k_x \) and \(k_y \), all discrete steady-state solutions of (1) are neutrally stable. Section 4 deals with two-parameter continuation algorithms for computing Bloch waves and with closed tubes at the four edges and, in particular, for closed tubes at the four corners of the Bloch band. The numerical results reported in Section 5 demonstrate the superfluidity of the BEC if the coefficient \(c\) of the cubic nonlinear term is greater than \(\nu \). Moreover, some closed loops are obtained at the four edges and four corners even for \(c \approx \nu \). Finally, some concluding remarks are given in Section 6.