DCDS Supplements (proc)


Pages: 171 - 180,    Volume: 2009 ,   Issue: Special ,       September 2009  

The coarse-grain description of interacting sine-Gordon solitons with varying widths

Full text: (214.7K)

Ivan Christov - Department of Engineering Sciences and Applied Mathematics, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL 60208-3125, United States (email)
C. I. Christov - Department of Mathematics, University of Louisiana at Lafayette, Lafayette, LA 70504-1010, United States (email)

Abstract: We study the dynamics of the sine-Gordon equation's kink soliton solutions under the coarse-grain description via two "collective variables": the position of the "center" of a soliton and its characteristic width ("size"). Integral expressions for the interaction potential and the quasi-particles' cross-masses are derived. However, these cannot be evaluated in closed form when the solitons have varying widths, so we develop a perturbation approach with the velocity of the faster soliton as the small parameter. This enables us to derive a system of four coupled second-order ODEs, one for each collective variable. The resulting initial-value problem is very stiff and numerical instabilities make it difficult to solve accurately, so a semi-empirical iterative approach to its solution is proposed. Then, we demonstrate that, even though it appears the solitons pass through each other, the quasi-particles actually "exchange" their pseudomasses during a collision.

Keywords: Solitons, Variational approximation, Quasi-particles, sine-Gordon equation, Nonlinear-wave quantization
Mathematics Subject Classification: Primary: 35Q51, 35Q53; Secondary: 49S05, 81V25

Received:  July   2008
Revised:   June  2009
Published: September  2009

`a`
Search
Title:
Author(s):
Year:
Key
words:
MSC:

Advanced Search

Copyright © AIMS 2009
Use of this service is subject to compliance with the terms and conditions of use. In particular, reselling and systematic downloading of files is prohibited.