Stability analysis of orbital modes for a generalized Lane–Emden equation

Abstract

We present a stability analysis of the standard nonautonomous systems type for a recently introduced generalized Lane-Emden equation which is shown to explain the presence of some of the structures observed in the atomic spatial distributions of magnetically-trapped ultracold atomic clouds. A Lyapunov function is defined which helps us to prove that stable spatial structures in the atomic clouds exist only for the adiabatic index γ = 1 + 1/n with even n. In the case when n is odd we provide an instability result indicating the divergence of the density function for the atoms. Several numerical solutions, which according to our stability analysis are stable, are also presented.