Uniqueness of ground states to fractional nonlinear elliptic equations with harmonic potential

Abstract

In this paper, we prove the uniqueness of ground states to the following fractional nonlinear elliptic equation with harmonic potential, \[ (-\Delta)^s u+ \left(\omega+|x|^2\right) u=|u|^{p-2}u \quad \mbox{in}\ \mathbb{R}^n, \] where $n \geq 1$ , $0< s<1$ , $\omega >-\lambda _{1,s}$ , $2< p< {2n}/{(n-2s)^+}$ , $\lambda _{1,s}>0$ is the lowest eigenvalue of $(-\Delta )^s + |x|^2$ . The fractional Laplacian $(-\Delta )^s$ is characterized as $\mathcal {F}((-\Delta )^{s}u)(\xi )=|\xi |^{2s} \mathcal {F}(u)(\xi )$ for $\xi \in \mathbb {R}^n$ , where $\mathcal {F}$ denotes the Fourier transform. This solves an open question in [M. Stanislavova and A. G. Stefanov. J. Evol. Equ. 21 (2021), 671–697.] concerning the uniqueness of ground states.