Gaussian solitary waves and compactons in Fermi-Pasta-Ulam lattices with Hertzian potentials

TL;DR

This paper investigates localized wave solutions in nonlinear FPU lattices with Hertzian potentials, deriving asymptotic models that predict Gaussian solitary waves and compactons, and confirms their properties through numerical and analytical methods.

Contribution

It introduces two asymptotic models for FPU lattices near linearity, revealing stable Gaussian solitary waves and compactons, and analyzes their convergence and stability properties.

Findings

Gaussian solitary waves are linearly orbitally stable.

Compactons with finite support are derived from the generalized KdV model.

Exact FPU solitary waves asymptotically resemble Gaussian profiles as pproaches 1.

Abstract

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 $\alpha >1$. 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 $\alpha$ 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 $\alpha \rightarrow 1^+$, 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.