Breathers on a background: periodic and quasiperiodic solutions of extended discrete nonlinear wave systems

In this paper we investigate the emergence of time-periodic and time quasiperiodic (sometimes infinitely long-lived and sometimes very long-lived or metastable) solutions of discrete nonlinear wave equations: discrete sine Gordon, discrete phi(4) and discrete nonlinear Schrodinger equation (DNLS). The solutions we consider are periodic oscillations on a kink or standing wave breather background. The origin of these oscillations is the presence of internal modes, associated with the static ground state. Some of these modes are associated with the breaking of translational invariance, in going from a spatially continuous to a spatially discrete system. Others are associated with discrete modes which bifurcate from the continuous spectrum. It is also possible that such modes exist in the continuum limit and persist in the discrete case. The regimes of existence, stability and metastability of states as the lattice spacing is varied are investigated analytically and numerically. A consequence of our analysis is a class of spatially localized, time quasiperiodic solutions of the discrete nonlinear Schrodinger equation. We demonstrate, however, that this class of quasiperiodic solutions is rather special and that its natural generalizations yield only metastable quasiperiodic solutions. (C) 2002 IMACS. Published by Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.