Nonlinear Waves Solitons And Chaos

The second edition of a highly successful book on nonlinear waves, solitons and chaos.

This textbook gives a detailed explanation of waves and oscillations in classical physics. These classical phenomena are dealt with at a more advanced level than is customary for second-year courses. All aspects of classical wave physics are presented, including the mathematical and physical basis needed for extended understanding. Finally several chapters are devoted to important topics in current wave physics. Special attention is given to nonlinear waves, solitons, chaotic behavior and associated phenomena. The new edition contains improvements such as full development of Greens functions, a broadening of the treatment of wave mechanics and a closer integration with classical mechanics, plus more examples and problems.

This textbook gives a detailed explanation of waves and oscillations in classical physics. These classical phenomena are dealt with at a more advanced level than is customary for second-year courses. All aspects of classical wave physics are presented, including the mathematical and physical basis needed for extended understanding. Finally several chapters are devoted to important topics in current wave physics. Special attention is given to nonlinear waves, solitons, chaotic behavior and associated phenomena. The new edition contains improvements such as full development of Greens functions, a broadening of the treatment of wave mechanics and a closer integration with classical mechanics, plus more examples and problems.

This is a text for the third semester of undergraduate physics for students in accel erated programs who typicaHy are preparing for advanced degrees in science or engineering. The third semester is often the only opportunity for physics depart ments to present to those of these students who are not physics majors a coherent background in the physics of waves required later for confident handling of applied problems, especially applications based on quantum mechanics. Physics is an integrated subject. It is often found that the going gets easier as one goes deeper, learning the mathematical connections tying together the vari ous phenomena. Even so, the steps that took us from classical wave physics to Heisenberg's "Physical Principles of Quantum Theory" were, as a matter of his tory, harder to take than later steps dealing with detailed applications. With these considerations in mind, the classical physics of oscillations and waves is devel oped here at a more advanced mathematical level than is customary in second year courses. This is done to explain the classical phenomena, but also to provide background for the introductory wave mechanics, leading to a logical integration of the latter subject into the presentation. The concluding chapters on nonlinear waves, solitons, and chaos broaden the previously established concepts of wave behavior, while introducing the reader to important topics in current wave physics.

At the end of the twentieth century, nonlinear dynamics turned out to be one of the most challenging and stimulating ideas. Notions like bifurcations, attractors, chaos, fractals, etc. have proved to be useful in explaining the world around us, be it natural or artificial. However, much of our everyday understanding is still based on linearity, i. e. on the additivity and the proportionality. The larger the excitation, the larger the response-this seems to be carved in a stone tablet. The real world is not always reacting this way and the additivity is simply lost. The most convenient way to describe such a phenomenon is to use a mathematical term-nonlinearity. The importance of this notion, i. e. the importance of being nonlinear is nowadays more and more accepted not only by the scientific community but also globally. The recent success of nonlinear dynamics is heavily biased towards temporal characterization widely using nonlinear ordinary differential equations. Nonlinear spatio-temporal processes, i. e. nonlinear waves are seemingly much more complicated because they are described by nonlinear partial differential equations. The richness of the world may lead in this case to coherent structures like solitons, kinks, breathers, etc. which have been studied in detail. Their chaotic counterparts, however, are not so explicitly analysed yet. The wavebearing physical systems cover a wide range of phenomena involving physics, solid mechanics, hydrodynamics, biological structures, chemistry, etc.

This new edition has been thoroughly revised, expanded and contain some updates function of the novel results and shift of scientific interest in the topics. The book has a Foreword by Jerry L. Bona and Hongqiu Chen. The book is an introduction to nonlinear waves and soliton theory in the special environment of compact spaces such a closed curves and surfaces and other domain contours. It assumes familiarity with basic soliton theory and nonlinear dynamical systems. The first part of the book introduces the mathematical concept required for treating the manifolds considered, providing relevant notions from topology and differential geometry. An introduction to the theory of motion of curves and surfaces - as part of the emerging field of contour dynamics - is given. The second and third parts discuss the modeling of various physical solitons on compact systems, such as filaments, loops and drops made of almost incompressible materials thereby intersecting with a large number of physical disciplines from hydrodynamics to compact object astrophysics. This book is intended for graduate students and researchers in mathematics, physics and engineering.

This volume provides an in-depth treatment of several equations and systems of mathematical physics, describing the propagation and interaction of nonlinear waves as different modifications of these: the KdV equation, Fornberg-Whitham equation, Vakhnenko equation, Camassa-Holm equation, several versions of the NLS equation, Kaup-Kupershmidt equation, Boussinesq paradigm, and Manakov system, amongst others, as well as symmetrizable quasilinear hyperbolic systems arising in fluid dynamics.Readers not familiar with the complicated methods used in the theory of the equations of mathematical physics (functional analysis, harmonic analysis, spectral theory, topological methods, a priori estimates, conservation laws) can easily be acquainted here with different solutions of some nonlinear PDEs written in a sharp form (waves), with their geometrical visualization and their interpretation. In many cases, explicit solutions (waves) having specific physical interpretation (solitons, kinks, peakons, ovals, loops, rogue waves) are found and their interactions are studied and geometrically visualized. To do this, classical methods coming from the theory of ordinary differential equations, the dressing method, Hirota's direct method and the method of the simplest equation are introduced and applied. At the end, the paradifferential approach is used.This volume is self-contained and equipped with simple proofs. It contains many exercises and examples arising from the applications in mechanics, physics, optics and, quantum mechanics.

This volume contains the proceedings of the AMS Special Session on Nonlinear Waves and Integrable Systems, held on April 13-14, 2013, at the University of Colorado, Boulder, Colorado. The field of nonlinear waves is an exciting area of modern mathematical research that also plays a major role in many application areas from physics and fluids. The articles in this volume present a diverse cross section of topics from this field including work on the Inverse Scattering Transform, scattering theory, inverse problems, numerical methods for dispersive wave equations, and analytic and computational methods for free boundary problems. Significant attention to applications is also given throughout the articles with an extensive presentation on new results in the free surface problem in fluids. This volume will be useful to students and researchers interested in learning current techniques in studying nonlinear dispersive systems from both the integrable systems and computational points of view.