In this paper, we are concerned with the standing waves for the following nonlinear Schrödinger equationwhere 0 < p < 4. This equation arises as an effective single particle model in X-ray Free ElectronLasers. We mainly study the existence and stability/instability properties of standing waves for this equation, in two cases: the first one is that no magnetic potential is involved, (i.e. b = 0 in the equation) and the second one is that b = 0. To be precise, in the first case, by considering a minimization problem on a suitable Pohozaev manifold, we prove the existence of radial solutions, and show further that the corresponding standing waves are strongly unstable by blow-up in finite time. Moreover, by making use of the ideas of these proofs, we are able to prove the existence and instability of normalized solutions, whose proofs seem to be new, compared with the studies of normalized solutions in the existing literature. This study also indicates that there is a close connection between the study of the strong instability and the one of the existence of normalized solutions. In the second case, the situation is more difficult to be treated, due to the additional term of the partial harmonic potential. We manage to prove the existence of stable standing waves for p ∈ (0, 4) and with some assumptions on the coefficients, solutions are obtained as global minimizers if p ∈ (0, 4 3 ], and as local minimizers if p ∈ [ 4 3 , 4). In the mass-critical and supercritical cases p ∈ [ 4 3 , 4), we also establish the variational characterization of the ground states on a new manifold which is different from the one neither of the Nehari type nor of the Pohozaev type, and then prove the existence of ground states. Finally under some assumptions on the coefficients, we prove that the ground state standing waves are strongly unstable.2010 Mathematics Subject Classification. 35Q55, 35J50, 37K45.for all t ∈ [0, T * ). This completes the proof.Proof of Theorem 1.11. When 4 3 ≤ p < 2, let u be the ground state related to (1.4), under the assumptionfor all λ > 1. By the same argument as Theorem 1.4, we can obtain the initial data χ M 0 u λ 0 ∈ Σ∩K ω such that the corresponding solution ψ λ 0 (t) of (1.3) blows up in finite time. Hence, we can prove this theorem.When 2 ≤ p < 4, we see from Lemma 6.2 that S b,ω (λu) < S b,ω (u), K b,ω (λu) < 0 and Q b (λu) < 0, for all λ > 1. Therefore, we can prove the strong instability along the above lines by replacing u λ 0 by λ 0 u. This completes the proof.