The virial theorem and ground state energy estimates of nonlinear Schrödinger equations in $$\mathbb {R}^2$$ R 2 with square root and saturable nonlinearities in nonlinear optics

Abstract

The virial theorem is a nice property for the linear Schrodinger equation in atomic and molecular physics as it gives an elegant ratio between the kinetic and potential energies and is useful in assessing the quality of numerically computed eigenvalues. If the governing equation is a nonlinear Schrodinger equation with power-law nonlinearity, then a similar ratio can be obtained but there seems to be no way of getting any eigenvalue estimates. It is surprising as far as we are concerned that when the nonlinearity is either square-root or saturable nonlinearity (not a power-law), one can develop a virial theorem and eigenvalue estimates of nonlinear Schrodinger (NLS) equations in $${{\mathbb {R}}^{2}}$$ with square-root and saturable nonlinearity, respectively. Furthermore, we show here that the eigenvalue estimates can be used to obtain the 2nd order term (which is of order $$\ln \Gamma $$ ) of the lower bound of the ground state energy as the coefficient $$\Gamma $$ of the nonlinear term tends to infinity.