The McGraw - Hill Companies “ Solitons in Electrical Networks ”

Solitons are a unique class of pulse-shaped waves that propagate in nonlinear dispersive media. In the course of propagation, they maintain spatial confinement of wave energy within the pulse shape without dispersion and exhibit remarkable nonlinear dynamics. Solitons are found throughout nature where fine balance between nonlinearity and dispersion is achieved. Dispersion alone would flatten out a pulse-shape wave during its course of propagation as different Fourier components of the wave would travel at different speeds. Nonlinearity, however, can counteract dispersion by making the pulse steepened and even topple over and break, as would be observed in the water waves approaching seashore. The first reported soliton (Russell 1834) was a mono-pulse of water wave in a narrow canal where the shallow water possessed both nonlinearity and dispersion. Other examples of solitons include vibrations in nonlinear spring-mass lattices, acoustic waves in plasmas, optical pulses in fiber optic cables, and fluxons in superconducting Josephson junctions.