Instability of gray solitons in a Gross-Pitaevskii model with a moving impurity

Abstract

The effect of a moving impurity in a dilute Bose-Einstein condensate is investigated by means of the one-dimensional Gross-Pitaevskii model (GP) with non-zero boundary conditions at infinity. The impurity is modeled as a localized external potential, that travels at constant speed $v \in \mathbf{R}$. In a co-moving reference frame, we study the existence and stability of time-independent solutions. The latter are of physical relevance, being associated with the superfluid behavior of the condensate. For every non-zero velocity $v$ in the subsonic regime, we show the existence of a family of time-independent solutions which bifurcates from a (displaced) gray soliton $ϕ_{0,v}(x-s_0)$, with $s_0 \in \mathbf{R}$, of the GP equation. The position $s_0$ is determined as an extremal point of an effective potential explicitly defined. Moreover, we study the spectral stability of these states. For small values of the potential strength, we show that the families originating from the maxima of the effective potential are spectrally unstable. For this last result, we employ an Evans function approach. Finally, we formally apply the instability result to the case of a repulsive delta potential.