Existence and orbital stability of the ground states with prescribed mass for the L^2-critical and supercritical NLS on bounded domains

Abstract

We study solutions of a semilinear elliptic equation with prescribed mass and Dirichlet homogeneous boundary conditions in the unitary ball. Such problem arises in the search of solitary wave solutions for nonlinear Schr\"odinger equations (NLS) with Sobolev subcritical power nonlinearity on bounded domains. Necessary and sufficient conditions are provided for the existence of such solutions. Moreover, we show that standing waves associated to least energy solutions are always orbitally stable when the nonlinearity is L^2-critical and subcritical, while they are almost always stable in the L^2-supercritical regime. The proofs are obtained in connection with the study of a variational problem with two constraints, of independent interest: to maximize the L^{p+1}-norm among functions having prescribed L^2 and H^1_0-norm.