Strong instability of standing waves for nonlinear Schrödinger equations with attractive inverse power potential

Abstract

We study the strong instability of standing waves $e^{i\omega t}\phi_\omega(x)$ for nonlinear Schrödinger equations with an $L^2$-supercritical nonlinearity and an attractive inverse power potential, where $\omega\in\mathbb{R}$ is a frequency, and $\phi_\omega\in H^1(\mathbb{R}^N)$ is a ground state of the corresponding stationary equation. Recently, for nonlinear Schrödinger equations with a harmonic potential, Ohta~(2018) proved that if $\partial_\lambda^2S_\omega(\phi_\omega^\lambda)|_{\lambda=1}\le0$, then the standing wave is strongly unstable, where $S_\omega$ is the action, and $\phi_\omega^\lambda(x)\mathrel{\mathop:}=\lambda^{N/2}\phi_\omega(\lambda x)$ is the scaling, which does not change the $L^2$-norm. In this paper, we prove the strong instability under the same assumption as the above-mentioned in inverse power potential case. Our proof is applicable to nonlinear Schrödinger equations with other potentials such as an attractive Dirac delta potential.