The origin and saturation of modulational instabilities (Q1078424)

The paper under review is an extended abstract of a work of the authors. It is known that the periodic sine-Gordon differential equation is a complicated infinite dimensional Hamiltonian system. However, frequently its asymptotic states, and those of nearby equations, are dominated by only a few degrees of freedom. The aim of the present report is to give an explanation of the origin of this low dimensionality and to describe a method for determining the dominant degrees of freedom.