Bound states at Trudinger--Moser growth: obstructions, pairing and bubbling

Abstract

We study radial solutions of the planar scalar field equation $$ -Δu+u=λu\,e^{u^2}, \qquad 0<λ<1, $$ whose nonlinearity has critical Trudinger--Moser growth. These solutions describe standing waves of the two-dimensional nonlinear Schrödinger and Klein--Gordon equations. Motivated by Tang&#39;s recent uniqueness result for radial bound states with power nonlinearities in higher dimensions, we investigate the validity of the corresponding uniqueness theory at critical exponential growth. We show that the Serrin--Tang criterion and two structural hypotheses in Tang&#39;s analysis fail in this setting. We establish a pairing principle for the shooting problem, prove that Tang&#39;s variation conditions force the nodal count to be non-decreasing, and show that any two radial ground states intersect. We also derive a second-order expansion of the Liouville bubble arising at large initial heights and compute the corresponding flux correction. These asymptotics yield formal predictions for the first zero and the nodal structure at large heights. Our results suggest that the ground state is unique, whereas nodal radial bound states, if they exist, occur in pairs, contrary to the uniqueness phenomenon for power nonlinearities.