Justification of leading order quasicontinuum approximations of strongly nonlinear lattices (Q476699)

The authors consider a 1D granular medium governed by the Hertz law. They write the equations satisfied by the relative displacement \(q_{n}\) of the \(n\) -th particle and by its strain \(u_{n}=q_{n-1}-q_{n}\). Introducing the long wave Ansatz \(u_{n}(t)=A(X,T)\) where \(X=\varepsilon n\) and \(T=\varepsilon t\) for \(\varepsilon \ll 1\), they derive the nonlinear evolution equation \(\partial _{T}^{2}A=\partial _{X}^{2}((\delta _{0}+A)^{p})\) with \(\delta _{0}>0\) and \( p\in \mathbb{R}^{+}\). The main result of the paper proves that if \(A\in C([0,T_{0}],H^{4})\) is a solution to this equation which satisfies the uniform bounds \(\sup_{T\in [ 0,T_{0}]}\sup_{X\in \mathbb{R}}\left| A(X,T)\right| \leq \delta _{0}/2\) and \(\sup_{T\in [ 0,T_{0}]}\left\| A(.,T)\right\| _{H^{4}}\leq C_{1}\) for \(C_{1}>0\) small enough then \(\sup_{T\in [ 0,T_{0}]}\sup_{n\in \mathbb{Z} }\left| u_{n}(t)-A(\varepsilon n,\varepsilon t)\right| \leq C\varepsilon ^{3/2}\) for some constant \(C\) and for \(\varepsilon \) small enough. The authors first prove a local existence and uniqueness result for the continuum equation. For the proof of their main result, they essentially use the Fourier transform on \(\mathbb{Z}\) and its inverse and the Fourier transform on \(\mathbb{R}\). They then describe a shock formation in such granular media for which they use numerical simulations. The paper ends with the justification of the Korteweg de Vries (KdV) and nonlinear Schrödinger equation (NLS) approximations, the authors here introducing the solution \(A\in C([0,T_{0}],H^{6})\) of the KdV equation or the solution \(A\in C([0,T_{0}],H^{19})\) of the NLS equation and proving similar convergence results than in their main result, under further hypotheses on the data of these equations.