Rarefaction pulses for the Nonlinear Schrödinger Equation in the transonic limit

We investigate the properties of finite energy travelling waves to the nonlinear Schrödinger equation with nonzero conditions at infinity for a wide class of nonlinearities. In space dimension two and three we prove that travelling waves converge in the transonic limit (up to rescaling) to ground states of the Kadomtsev-Petviashvili equation. Our results generalize an earlier result of F. Béthuel, P. Gravejat and J-C. Saut for the two-dimensional Gross-Pitaevskii equation, and provide a rigorous proof to a conjecture by C. Jones and P. H. Roberts about the existence of an upper branch of travelling waves in dimension three.