Nonlinear Vibrations And The Wave Equation

This book gathers the revised lecture notes from a seminar course offered at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro in 1986, then in Tokyo in 1987. An additional chapter has been added to reflect more recent advances in the field.

The authors discuss the interrelationship of linear vibration theory for multi-degree-of-freedom systems; nonlinear dynamics and chaos; and nonlinear control. No other book covers these areas in the same way, so this is a new perspective on these topics.

Many partial differential equations (PDEs) that arise in physics can be viewed as infinite-dimensional Hamiltonian systems. This monograph presents recent existence results of nonlinear oscillations of Hamiltonian PDEs, particularly of periodic solutions for completely resonant nonlinear wave equations. The text serves as an introduction to research in this fascinating and rapidly growing field. Graduate students and researchers interested in variational techniques and nonlinear analysis applied to Hamiltonian PDEs will find inspiration in the book.

The theory of nonlinear wave equations in the absence of shocks began in the 1960s. Despite a great deal of recent activity in this area, some major issues remain unsolved, such as sharp conditions for the global existence of solutions with arbitrary initial data, and the global phase portrait in the presence of periodic solutions and traveling waves. This book, based on lectures presented by the author at George Mason University in January 1989, seeks to present the sharpest results to date in this area. The author surveys the fundamental qualitative properties of the solutions of nonlinear wave equations in the absence of boundaries and shocks. These properties include the existence and regularity of global solutions, strong and weak singularities, asymptotic properties, scattering theory and stability of solitary waves. Wave equations of hyperbolic, Schrodinger, and KdV type are discussed, as well as the Yang-Mills and the Vlasov-Maxwell equations. The book offers readers a broad overview of the field and an understanding of the most recent developments, as well as the status of some important unsolved problems. Intended for mathematicians and physicists interested in nonlinear waves, this book would be suitable as the basis for an advanced graduate-level course.

This book focuses on the main idea that highly-excited molecular vibration is a nonlinear, many-body and semiclassical system. Therefore, many ideas and techniques in nonlinear fields such as chaos, resonance, Lyapunov exponent, etc. can be incorporated into this study. Together with the Lie algebraic coset algorithm, readers are able to approach the topics in a simple arithmetic and realistic way in contrast to the traditional solving of Schrödinger equation.Covering the author's research in over two decades, these works bridge the gaps between molecular vibration and nonlinear sciences, many new characters are introduced for molecular highly-excited vibration from a fresh viewpoint of nonlinearity, especially, the chaos. Related works of the elementary ideas in this field can be found in the first three chapters for the readers to be familiar with, while the rest of the chapters offer concrete examples with flourishing ideas and results on system dynamics which are not known or neglected by the traditional wave function algorithm.

This work examines the mathematical aspects of nonlinear wave propagation, emphasizing nonlinear hyperbolic problems. It introduces the tools that are most effective for exploring the problems of local and global existence, singularity formation, and large-time behaviour of solutions, and for the study of perturbation methods.