Minimizing travelling waves for the Gross-Pitaevskii equation on $\mathbb{R} \times \mathbb{T}$

Abstract

We study the Gross-Pitaevskii equation in dimension two with periodic conditions in one direction, or equivalently on the product space $\mathbb{R} \times \mathbb{T}_L$ where $L > 0$ and $\mathbb{T}_L = \mathbb{R} / L \mathbb{Z}.$ We focus on the variational problem consisting in minimizing the Ginzburg-Landau energy under a fixed momentum constraint. We prove that there exists a threshold value for $L$ below which minimizers are the one-dimensional dark solitons, and above which no minimizer can be one-dimensional.