Boundary geometry and concentration points for attractive Bose-Einstein condensates with a ring-shaped potential

Abstract

In this paper, we study the ground states of attractive Bose-Einstein condensates in a bounded domain $Ω\subset \mathbb R^2$ under the ring-shaped trapping potential $$ V(x)=(|x|-1)^2. $$ The boundary geometry of $Ω$ may allow the ring $Γ=\{x\in\mathbb R^2:|x|=1\}$ of global minima for $V(x)$ to meet both the interior and the boundary of $Ω$. As the interaction strength approaches the critical value, we prove that if $Γ\cap Ω\not=\emptyset$, the mass of ground states concentrates at a point $x_0\inΓ\cap Ω$ that has maximal distance from $\partialΩ$. Our method relies on exponential upper and lower bounds for the difference between the bounded domain and whole space minimal energies. The essential lower bound follows from a uniform quadratic-growth estimate near the ground state manifold of the whole space problem, which is established by combining the nondegeneracy of the optimizer for the Gagliardo-Nirenberg inequality with a Lyapunov-Schmidt reduction.