Solitons in dissipative media National Institute of…孤子在耗散媒体国家研究所.pdfVIP

Romanian Reports in Physics, Volume 55, Number 4, P.523-531, 2003 523 Solitons in dissipative media D. Mihalache Department of Theoretical Physics, Institute of Atomic Physics, ”Horia Hulubei” National Institute of Physics and Nuclear Engineering, PO Box MG-6, Bucharest, Romania Abstract A brief overview of recent results in the field of solitons in dissipative systems is given. One of the most important achievements in nonlinear science has been the discovery of solitons, which are self-localized solutions of certain nonlinear partial differential equations describing the evolution of nonlinear dynamical systems with an infinite number of degrees of freedom [1, 2]. The solitons preserve their shape upon interaction and can be viewed as ”nonlinear modes” of the corresponding physical system. They are usually attributed to the so called completely integrable models, which are usually obtained as extreme simplifications of complex physical systems. However, solitons or more properly solitary waves in nonintegrable systems (either Hamiltonian or dissipative ones) can also be regarded as nonlinear modes, being qualitatively different from their counterparts in completely integrable systems. Thus, the rather complicated behaviour of the system may be described in terms of just a few degrees of freedom. It is important to notice that in nondissipative Hamiltonian systems the solitary waves form as a result of a balance between diffraction and/or dispersion and nonlinearity, whereas in dissipative systems, gain and loss must also be balanced. In the former situation, the solitons form continuous families with one (or few) par