Breathing Patterns in Nonlinear Relaxation

In numerical experiments involving nonlinear solitary waves propagating through nonhomogeneous media one observes “breathing” in the sense of the amplitude of the wave going up and down on a much faster scale than the motion of the wave – see Fig. 2 below. In this paper we investigate this phenomenon in the simplest case of stationary waves in which the evolution corresponds to relaxation to a nonlinear ground state. The particular model is the popular δ0 impurity in the cubic nonlinear Schrödinger equation on the line. We give asymptotics of the amplitude on a finite but relevant time interval and show their remarkable agreement with numerical experiments, see Fig. 1. We stress the nonlinear origin of the “breathing patterns” caused by the selection of the ground state depending on the initial data, and by the non-normality of the linearized operator.