Dark solitons in external potentials

Abstract.We consider the persistence and stability of dark solitons in the Gross–Pitaevskii (GP) equation with a small decaying potential. We show that families of black solitons with zero speed originate from extremal points of an appropriately defined effective potential and persist for sufficiently small strength of the potential. We prove that families at the maximum points are generally unstable with exactly one real positive eigenvalue, …