Standing Waves in a Non-linear 1D Lattice : Floquet Multipliers, Krein Signatures, and Stability

We construct a class of exact commensurate and incommensurate standing wave (SW) solutions in a piecewise smooth analogue of the discrete non-linear Schrödinger (DNLS) model and present their linear stability analysis. In the case of the commensurate SW solutions the analysis reduces to the eigenvalue problem of a transfer matrix depending parametrically on the eigenfrequency. The spectrum of eigenfrequencies and the corresponding eigenmodes can thereby be determined exactly. The spatial periodicity of a commensurate SW implies that the eigenmodes are of the Bloch form, characterised by an even number of Floquet multipliers. The spectrum is made up of bands that, in general, include a number of transition points corresponding to changes in the disposition of the Floquet multipliers. The latter characterise the different band segments. An alternative characterisation of the segments is in terms of the Krein signatures associated with the eigenfrequencies. When one or more parameters characterising the SW solution is made to vary, one occasionally encounters collisions between the band-edges or the intra-band transition points and, depending on the the Krein signatures of the colliding bands or segments, the spectrum may stretch out in the complex plane, leading to the onset of instability. We elucidate the correlation between the disposition of Floquet multipliers and the Krein signatures, presenting two specific examples where the SW possesses a definite window of stability, as distinct from the SW’s obtained close to the anticontinuous and linear limits of the DNLS model.