The talk investigates the relations between normalized critical points of the nonlinear Schrödinger energy functional and critical points of the corresponding action functional on the associated Nehari manifold.

First, we show that the ground state levels are strongly related by the following duality result: the (negative) energy ground state level is the Legendre—Fenchel transform of the action ground state level. Furthermore, whenever an energy ground state exists at a certain frequency, then all action ground states with that frequency have the same mass and are energy ground states too. We see that the converse is in general false and that the action ground state level may fail to be convex. Next we analyze the differentiability of the ground state action level and we provide an explicit expression involving the mass of action ground states. Finally we show that similar results hold also for local minimizers, and we exhibit examples of domains where our results apply.

The matter of the talk refers to joint works with Enrico Serra and Paolo Tilli.