Ground state in the energy super-critical Gross-Pitaevskii equation with a harmonic potential

Abstract: The energy super-critical Gross--Pitaevskii equation with a harmonic potential is revisited in the particular case of cubic focusing nonlinearity and dimension d > 4. In order to prove the existence of a ground state (a positive, radially symmetric solution in the energy space), we develop the shooting method and deal with a one-parameter family of classical solutions to an initial-value problem for the stationary equation. We prove that the solution curve (the graph of the eigenvalue parameter versus the supremum) is oscillatory for d <= 12 and monotone for d >= 13. Compared to the existing literature, rigorous asymptotics are derived by constructing three families of solutions to the stationary equation with functional-analytic rather than geometric methods.