T. Dohnal, D. Pelinovsky, and G. Schneider

Traveling modulating pulse solutions with small tails for a nonlinear wave equation in periodic media

Nonlinearity 37 (2024) 055005 (36pp)

Abstract:
Traveling modulating pulse solutions consist of a small amplitude pulse-like envelope moving with a constant speed and modulating a harmonic carrier wave. Such solutions can be approximated by solitons of an effective nonlinear Schrodinger equation arising as the envelope equation. We are interested in a rigorous existence proof of such solutions for a nonlinear wave equation with spatially periodic coefficients. Such solutions are quasi-periodic in a reference frame co-moving with the envelope. We use spatial dynamics, invariant manifolds, and near-identity transformations to construct such solutions on large domains in time and space. Although the spectrum of the linearized equations in the spatial dynamics formulation contains infinitely many eigenvalues on the imaginary axis or in the worst case the complete imaginary axis, a small denominator problem is avoided when the solutions are localized on a finite spatial domain with small tails in far fields.

Keywords:
nonlinear wave equation; traveling modulating pulses; spatial dynamics; invariant manifolds; amplitude equations;