A lower bound on the energy of travelling waves of fixed speed for the Gross-Pitaevskii equation

Abstract.

In this paper we consider the Gross-Pitaevskii equation iu _t = Δu + u(1 − |u|²), where u is a complex-valued function defined on ${\Bbb R}^N\times{\Bbb R}$, N ≥ 2, and in particular the travelling waves, i.e., the solutions of the form u(x, t) = ν(x ₁ − ct, x ₂, …, x _N ), where $c\in{\Bbb R}$ is the speed. We prove for c fixed the existence of a lower bound on the energy of any non-constant travelling wave. This bound provides a non-existence result for non-constant travelling waves of fixed speed having small energy.