Coherent structures, such as solitary waves, appear in many physical problems, including fluid mechanics, optics, quantum physics, and plasma physics. A less studied setting is found in geophysics, where highly viscous fluids couple to evolving material parameters to model partially molten rock, magma, in the Earth’s interior. Solitary waves are also found here, but the equations lack useful ma...

One-dimensional "sonic vacuum" type phononic crystals were assembled from a chain of polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE,Teflon) spheres with different diameters in a Teflon holder. It was demonstrated that this polymer-based sonic vacuum, with exceptionally low elastic modulus of particles, supports propagation of strongly nonlinear solitary waves with a very low speed. These solitary waves can be d...

Solitary waves bifurcated from edges of Bloch bands in two-dimensional periodic media are determined both analytically and numerically in the context of a two-dimensional nonlinear Schrödinger equation with a periodic potential. Using multiscale perturbation methods, the envelope equations of solitary waves near Bloch bands are analytically derived. These envelope equations reveal that solitary...

In this paper, we consider two types of solutions of the rotation-two-component Camassa-Holm (R2CH) system, a model in the equatorial water waves with the effect of the Coriolis force. The first type of solutions exhibits finite time singularity in the sense of wave-breaking. We perform a refined analysis based on the local structure of the dynamics to provide some criteria that leads to the bl...

We consider a chain of elastic beads subjected to vanishingly weak loading conditions, i.e., the beads are barely in contact. The grains repel upon contact via the Hertz-type potential, Vinfinitydelta(n), n>2, where delta> or =0, delta being the grain-grain overlap. Our dynamical simulations build on several earlier studies by Nesterenko, Coste, and Sen and co-workers that have shown that an im...

We obtain linearized (i.e., non-global) convergence conditions for iterative methods that seek solitary waves with prescribed values of quadratic conserved quantities of multicomponent Hamiltonian nonlinear wave equations. These conditions extend the ones found for single-component solitary waves in a recent publication by J. Yang and the present author. We also show that, and why, these conver...

Coherent structures, such as solitary waves, appear in many physical problems, including fluid mechanics, optics, quantum physics, and plasma physics. A less studied setting is found in geophysics, where highly viscous fluids couple to evolving material parameters to model partially molten rock, magma, in the Earth’s interior. Solitary waves are also found here, but the equations lack useful ma...

New analytic sech2-type traveling solitary-wave solutions, satisfying zero background at infinity, of a general fifth-order shallow water-wave model are found and compared with previously obtained non-zero background solutions. The allowed coefficient regions for the solitary-wave solutions are classified by requiring the wave number and angular frequency to be real. Detailed numerical simulati...

It was shown in [1] that waves in a two-layer system with free-surface boundary conditions (or in a three-layer system) can be modelled by a system of two coupled long wave equations. The study of the resonance between a solitary wave of one of the two equations and a copropagating periodic wave of the other equation is carried out numerically. The resulting wave is a generalized solitary wave....

Solitary water waves are long nonlinear waves that can propagate steadily over long distances. They were first observed by Russell in 1837 in a now famous report [26] on his observations of a solitary wave propagating along a Scottish canal, and on his subsequent experiments. Some forty years later theoretical work by Boussinesq [8] and Rayleigh [25] established an analytical model. Then in 189...