Stable standing waves for a NLS on star graphs as local minimizers of the constrained energy

On a star graph made of N≥3 halflines (edges) we consider a Schrödinger equation with a subcritical power-type nonlinearity and an attractive delta interaction located at the vertex. From previous works it is known that there exists a family of standing waves, symmetric with respect to the exchange of edges, that can be parametrized by the mass (or L2-norm) of its elements. Furthermore, if the mass is small enough, then the corresponding symmetric standing wave is a ground state and, consequently, it is orbitally stable. On the other hand, if the mass is above a threshold value, then the system has no ground state.Here we prove that orbital stability holds for every value of the mass, even if the corresponding symmetric standing wave is not a ground state, since it is anyway a local minimizer of the energy among functions with the same mass.The proof is based on a new technique that allows to restrict the analysis to functions made of pieces of soliton, reducing the problem to a finite-dimensional one. In such a way, we do not need to use direct methods of Calculus of Variations, nor linearization procedures.