Existence and multiplicity of peaked bound states for nonlinear Schrödinger equations on metric graphs

We establish existence and multiplicity of one-peaked and multi-peaked positive bound states for nonlinear Schrödinger equations on general compact and noncompact metric graphs. Precisely, we construct solutions concentrating at every vertex of odd degree greater than or equal to 3. We show that these solutions are not minimizers of the associated action and energy functionals. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work exhibiting solutions concentrating at vertices with degree different than 1. The proof is based on a suitable Ljapunov–Schmidt reduction.