Solitons on lattices and curved space-time

Abstract

This thesis is concerned with solitons (solutions of certain nonlinear partial differential equations) in certain cases when the underlying space is either a lattice or curved. Chapter 2 of the thesis is concerned with the outcome of collisions between a kink (a 1-dimensional soliton) and an antikink for certain topological discrete (TD) systems. The systems considered are the TD sine-Gordon and the TD ø(^4) For the TD sine-Gordon system it is found that the kink can support an internal shape mode which plays an important role during the collisions. In particular, this mode can be excited during collisions and this leads to spectacular resonance effects. The outcome of any particular collision has sensitive dependence on the initial conditions and could be either a trapped kink-antikink state, a "reflection" or a "transmission”. Such resonance effects are already known to exist for the conventional discrete ø(^4) system, and the TD ø(^4) system is no different, though the results for the two are not entirely similar. Chapter 3 considers the question of the existence of explicit travelling kink solutions for lattice systems. In particular, an expression for such a solution for the integrable lattice sine-Gordon system is derived. In Chapter 4, by reducing the Yang-Mills equations on the (2 + 2)-dimensional ultrahyperbolic space-time, an integrable Yang-Mills-Higgs system on (2 + 1) dimensional de Sitter space-time is derived. It represents the curved space-time version of the Bogomolny equations for monopoles on R(^3) . Using twister methods, various explicit solutions with gauge groups U(l) and SU(2) are constructed. A multi-solution SU(2) solution is also presented.