Every minimizer of the Weinstein functional has the form
where is the positive radial NLS ground state. The Euler-Lagrange equation first reduces a minimizer to a rescaled ground-state equation; the equality cases in the diamagnetic and rearrangement inequalities give the constant phase, translation, and radial profile.
Existence of a Weinstein-functional minimizer Created 2026-09-28 Updated 2026-11-05
For nonzero , the Weinstein functional is invariant under amplitude multiplication and spatial dilation. Apply symmetric decreasing rearrangement to a minimizing sequence, then use those two invariances to arrange
with nonnegative radial, radially nonincreasing . Rearrangement preserves the relevant Lp norms and does not increase the gradient L2 norm.
These monotone radial profiles have uniform pointwise bounds , since their value on a ball is bounded by its average squared mass. For every , this gives
Local Rellich-Kondrachov compactness theorem and this tail bound yield strong convergence in after a subsequence; this exponent is below for , the upper range in the Sobolev embedding theorem; put for . The argument also covers because monotone rearrangement, rather than radial symmetry alone, controls the tails.
The Gagliardo-Nirenberg interpolation inequality bounds the infimum of the Weinstein functional away from zero. The strong nonlinear-norm limit is therefore nonzero. Weak lower semicontinuity of the two normalized quadratic norms shows that the limit attains the infimum, giving a nonnegative minimizer.
Set . For , the change of variables gives
and
The factors cancel, so the Weinstein functional satisfies .
The Gagliardo-Nirenberg interpolation inequality gives
Consequently for every nonzero , and therefore .
Part 3 and Mass conservation for the nonlinear Schrödinger equation give
The last relation and the energy formula imply
where the final equality follows from the Pohozaev identity for the mass-critical NLS ground state. Thus is a minimizing sequence for the Weinstein functional with the same normalization as .
Apply the profile decomposition from part 4. The Sharp Gagliardo-Nirenberg inequality bounds each profile by the product of its gradient energy and its mass to the power . Since the total mass is exactly , any split into two nonzero profiles would make the limiting inequality strict. Hence precisely one profile carries all the mass and gradient energy. The norm decouplings then make the remainder converge strongly to zero in . For suitable translations ,
and the Sobolev embedding theorem gives the required strong convergence in . This is the compactness of a mass-critical minimizing sequence.
Pohozaev identity for the mass-critical NLS ground state Created 2026-09-28 Updated 2026-11-05
Testing the ground-state equation against and applying the Pohozaev identity gives
Consequently and , where is the Weinstein functional.
Weinstein functional Created 2026-09-28 Updated 2026-11-05
For and nonzero , the mass-critical Weinstein functional is
It is invariant under multiplication by a nonzero scalar, spatial dilation, translation, and constant phase. Its positive minimizers are rescalings and translations of the NLS ground state.