646 research outputs found
Modulational Instability in Equations of KdV Type
It is a matter of experience that nonlinear waves in dispersive media,
propagating primarily in one direction, may appear periodic in small space and
time scales, but their characteristics --- amplitude, phase, wave number, etc.
--- slowly vary in large space and time scales. In the 1970's, Whitham
developed an asymptotic (WKB) method to study the effects of small
"modulations" on nonlinear periodic wave trains. Since then, there has been a
great deal of work aiming at rigorously justifying the predictions from
Whitham's formal theory. We discuss recent advances in the mathematical
understanding of the dynamics, in particular, the instability of slowly
modulated wave trains for nonlinear dispersive equations of KdV type.Comment: 40 pages. To appear in upcoming title in Lecture Notes in Physic
Gaussian solitary waves and compactons in Fermi-Pasta-Ulam lattices with Hertzian potentials
We consider a class of fully-nonlinear Fermi-Pasta-Ulam (FPU) lattices,
consisting of a chain of particles coupled by fractional power nonlinearities
of order . This class of systems incorporates a classical Hertzian
model describing acoustic wave propagation in chains of touching beads in the
absence of precompression. We analyze the propagation of localized waves when
is close to unity. Solutions varying slowly in space and time are
searched with an appropriate scaling, and two asymptotic models of the chain of
particles are derived consistently. The first one is a logarithmic KdV
equation, and possesses linearly orbitally stable Gaussian solitary wave
solutions. The second model consists of a generalized KdV equation with
H\"older-continuous fractional power nonlinearity and admits compacton
solutions, i.e. solitary waves with compact support. When , we numerically establish the asymptotically Gaussian shape of exact FPU
solitary waves with near-sonic speed, and analytically check the pointwise
convergence of compactons towards the limiting Gaussian profile
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