Bifurcations and Spectral Stability of Solitary Waves in Coupled Nonlinear Schrödinger Equations

Abstract: We study bifurcations and spectral stability of solitary waves in coupled nonlinear Schr\"odinger equations (CNLS) on the line. We assume that the coupled equations possess a solution of which one component is identically zero, and call it a $\textit{fundamental solitary wave}$. By using a result of one of the authors and his collaborator, the bifurcations of the fundamental solitary wave are detected. We utilize the Hamiltonian-Krein index theory and Evans function technique to determine the spectral or orbital stability of the bifurcated solitary waves as well as as that of the fundamental one under some nondegenerate conditions which are easy to verify, compared with those of the previous results. We apply our theory to CNLS with a cubic nonlinearity and give numerical evidences for the theoretical results.