Spectral stability and instability of solitary waves of the Dirac equation with concentrated nonlinearity

Abstract

We consider the nonlinear Dirac equation with Soler-type nonlinearity concentrated at one point and present a detailed study of the spectrum of linearization at solitary waves. We then consider two different perturbations of the nonlinearity which break the $\mathbf{SU}(1,1)$-symmetry: the first preserving and the second breaking the parity symmetry. We show that a perturbation which breaks the $\mathbf{SU}(1,1)$-symmetry but not the parity symmetry also preserves the spectral stability of solitary waves. Then we consider a perturbation which breaks both the $\mathbf{SU}(1,1)$-symmetry and the parity symmetry and show that this perturbation destroys the stability of weakly relativistic solitary waves. The developing instability is due to the bifurcations of positive-real-part eigenvalues from the embedded eigenvalues $\pm 2\omega\mathrm{i}$.