Saturation of black hole lasers in Bose-Einstein condensates

To obtain the end-point evolution of the so-called black hole laser instability, we study the set of stationary solutions of the Gross-Pitaevskii equation for piecewise constant potentials which admit a homogeneous solution with a supersonic flow in the central region between two discontinuities. When the distance between them is larger than a critical value, we find that the homogeneous solution is unstable, and we identify the lowest energy state. We show that it can be viewed as determining the saturated value of the first (nodeless) complex frequency mode which drives the instability. We also classify the set of stationary solutions and establish their relation both with the set of complex frequency modes and with known soliton solutions. Finally, we adopt a procedure a la Pitaevski-Baym-Pethick to construct the effective functional which governs the transition from the homogeneous to nonhomogeneous solutions.