Solitons

This title is printed to order. This book may have been self-published. If so, we cannot guarantee the quality of the content. In the main most books will have gone through the editing process however some may not. We therefore suggest that you be aware of this before ordering this book. If in doubt check either the author or publisher’s details as we are unable to accept any returns unless they are faulty. Please contact us if you have any questions.

Until the beginning of this decade the number of significant exactly soluble problems in physics was limited to a very few: the classical or quanti sed harmonic oscillator, the linearised many-body problem, the quanti sed hydrogen atom, Newton’s solution of the planetary orbit problem, Onsager’s solution of the two-dimensional Ising problem, almost exhaust the list. Now the situation is quite different. We have a large number of exactly soluble nonlinear systems of physical significance and the number of these is growing steadily. Recent examples include a limited solution of Ein- stein’s field equations!, an apparently exact solution of the quantised sine-Gordon 2 equation u - U = sin(u) which establishes connections with the Ising models , xx tt 3 and a solution of the equations of motion of a rigid body in g dimensions . This book is concerned with problems such as these. But more specifically it is concerned with solitons. These mathematical objects are exact, analytical, solutions of nonlinear wave or evolution equations like the sine-Gordon equation (s-G) or the Korteweg-de Vries equation (KdV) u + 6uu + u = O. The discovery by Gardner, t x xxx .