Stability in the energy space for chains of solitons of the one-dimensional Gross-Pitaevskii equation (Q486740)

In this article, chains of solitons refer to finite sum of solitons which are well separated and whose speeds are ordered in such way that each soliton taken separately would remain well separated from the others in the future. The stability analysis is performed on a hydrodynamical reformulation of the Gross-Pitaevskii equation which is locally well-posed and which possesses a conserved energy and momentum. The stability result states that any initial data in a small enough neighbourhood of a chain of solitons gives rise to a time-global solution which remains in a uniformly bounded neighbourhood of a chain of solitons whose centers evolve with time but speeds do not. The proof relies on the conservation of the energy and the momentum and the fact that a soliton minimises the energy for a given momentum. One looks for the exact solution at time t as an approximate chain of solitons such that the (big) distance between two solitons depends on time and such that the speed of each soliton also evolves with time. Plugging this expression in the energy and the momentum, one can express these quantities as sums according to the chain of solitons plus some small remainder. Then, thanks to the global conservation it is possible to bound each term in these sums uniformly in time. As a consequence the speeds of the solitons are shown to remain uniformly close to their initial value. The stability result follows.