On the Stability of 2D Dipolar Bose--Einstein Condensates

We study the existence of energy minimizers for a Bose-Einstein condensate with dipole-dipole interactions, tightly confined to a plane. The problem is critical in that the kinetic energy and the (partially attractive) interaction energy behave the same under mass-preserving scalings of the wave-function. We obtain a sharp criterion for the existence of ground states, involving the optimal constant of a certain generalized Gagliardo-Nirenberg inequality.