Action minimising fronts in general FPU-type chains (Q2430399)

The authors study atomic chains with nonlinear nearest neighbour interactions and prove the existence of fronts, i.e., heteroclinic traveling waves with constant asymptotic states. After the discussion of the macroscopic constraints and normalization the asymptotic states the front equation is reformulated as an eigenvalue problem for a nonlinear integral operator. Then the existence problem is stated into a variational framework and fronts are characterized as minimizers of the action integral. The main technical result of the basic theorem (its proof uses the suggested ``separation of phases'' approach) guarantees that this action integral attains its minimum on a suitable set candidates for fronts and allows to extract convergent subsequences from action minimising sequences. In conclusion the results on numerical simulations are given.