We study the stability of traveling waves of the nonlinear Schrödinger equation with nonzero condition at infinity obtained via a constrained variational approach. Two important physical models for this are the Gross–Pitaevskii (GP) equation and the cubic-quintic equation. First, under a non-degeneracy condition we prove a sharp instability criterion for 3D traveling waves of (GP), which had been conjectured in the physical literature. This result is also extended for general nonlinearity and higher dimensions, including 4D (GP) and 3D cubic-quintic equations. Second, for cubic-quintic type nonlinearity, we construct slow traveling waves and prove their nonlinear instability in any dimension. For dimension two, the non-degeneracy condition is also proved for these slow traveling waves. For general traveling waves without vortices (that is nonvanishing) and with general nonlinearity in any dimension, we find a sharp condition for linear instability. Third, we prove that any 2D traveling wave of (GP) is transversally unstable, and we find the sharp interval of unstable transversal wave numbers. Near unstable traveling waves of all of the above cases, we construct unstable and stable invariant manifolds.

We investigate the nonlinear stability of the superposition of a viscous contact wave and two rarefaction waves for a one-dimensional (1D) bipolar Vlasov--Poisson--Boltzmann (VPB) system, which can be used to describe the transportation of charged particles under the additional electrostatic potential force. Based on a new micro-macro type of decomposition around the local Maxwellian related to the bipolar VPB system in the previous work [H.-L. Li, Y. Wang, T. Yang, and M.-Y. Zhong, <i>Arch. Ration. Mech. Anal.</i>, 228 (2018), pp. 39--127], we prove that the superposition of a viscous contact wave and two rarefaction waves is time-asymptotically stable to the 1D bipolar VPB system under some smallness conditions on the initial perturbations and wave strength, which implies that this typical superposition wave pattern is nonlinearly stable under the combined effects of the binary collisions, the electrostatic potential

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In this note, we study submanifold geometry of the Atiyah--Hitchin manifold, a double cover of the 2-monopole moduli space, which plays an important role in various settings such as the supersymmetric background of string theory. When the manifold is naturally identified as the total space of a line bundle over S^2, the zero section is a distinguished minimal 2-sphere of considerable interest. In particular, there has been a conjecture about the uniqueness of this minimal 2-sphere among all closed minimal 2-surfaces. We show that this minimal 2-sphere satisfies the ``strong stability condition" proposed in our earlier work, and confirm the global uniqueness as a corollary.

Motivated by a model proposed by Peng et al. [Advances in Coll. and Interf. Sci. 206 (2014)] for break-up of tear films on human eyes, we study the dynamics of a generalized thin film model. The governing equations form a fourth-order coupled system of nonlinear parabolic PDE for the film thickness and salt concentration subject to nonconservative effects representing evaporation. We analytically prove the global existence of solutions to this model with mobility exponents in several different ranges and the results are then validated against PDE simulations. We also numerically capture other interesting dynamics of the model, including finite-time rupture-shock phenomenon due to the instabilities caused by locally elevated evaporation rates, convergence to equilibrium and infinite-time thinning.