NLS Ground States on a Hybrid Plane

We study the existence, the nonexistence, and the shape of the ground states of a Nonlinear Schrödinger Equation on a manifold called hybrid plane, that consists of a half-line whose origin is connected to a plane. The nonlinearity is of power type, focusing and subcritical. The energy is the sum of the Nonlinear Schrödinger energies with a contact interaction on the half-line and on the plane with an additional quadratic term that couples the two components. By ground state we mean every minimizer of the energy at a fixed mass. As a first result, we single out the following rule: a ground state exists if and only if the confinement near the junction is energetically more convenient than escaping at infinity along the halfline, while escaping through the plane is shown to be never convenient. The problem of existence reduces then to a competition with the one-dimensional solitons. By this criterion, we prove existence of ground states for large and small values of the mass. Moreover, we show that at given mass a ground state exists if one of the following conditions is satisfied: the interaction at the origin of the half-line is not too repulsive; the interaction at the origin of the plane is sufficiently attractive; the coupling between the half-line and the plane is strong enough. On the other hand, nonexistence holds if the contact interactions on the half-line and on the plane are repulsive enough and the coupling is not too strong. Finally, we provide qualitative features of ground states. In particular, we show that in the presence of coupling every ground state is supported both on the half-line and on the plane and each component has the shape of a ground state at its mass for the related Nonlinear Schrödinger energy with a suitable contact interaction. These are the first results for the Nonlinear Schrödinger Equation on a manifold of mixed dimensionality.