Uniqueness and symmetry of ground states for higher-order equations

Abstract

We establish uniqueness and radial symmetry of ground states for higher-order nonlinear Schr\"odinger and Hartree equations whose higher-order differentials have small coefficients. As an application, we obtain error estimates for higher-order approximations to the pseudo-relativistic ground state. Our proof adapts the strategy of Lenzmann using local uniqueness near the limit of ground states in a variational problem. However, in order to bypass difficulties from lack of symmetrization tools for higher-order differential operators, we employ the contraction mapping argument in our earlier work to construct radially symmetric real-valued solutions, as well as improving local uniqueness near the limit.