Discrete breathers of nonlinear dimer lattices: bridging the anti-continuous and continuous limits (Q6166010)

This article studies the asymptotic theory and numerical simulations of infinite array of nonlinear dimer oscillators which are linearly coupled as in the classical model of Su, Schrieffer and Heeger (SSH), where the ratio of in-cell and out-of-cell couplings of the SSH model defines distinct phases. The authors obtain two main results. The first one is the existence of discrete breather solutions for sufficiently small values of the out-of-cell coupling parameter, for the case of weak out-of-cell coupling with any prescribed isolated dimer frequency \(\omega_b\) satisfying non-resonance and non-degeneracy assumptions, with states being \(\frac{2\pi}{\omega_b}\)-periodic in time and exponentially localized in space. The second one is the global continuation with respect to this coupling parameter. They first consider the case where the seeding discrete breather frequency \(\omega_b\) is in the phonon gap of the underlying linear infinite array, and where the phonon gap decreases in width and tends to a point due to the coupling is increased. In this limit, the spatial scale of the discrete breather grows and its amplitude decreases, which indicates the weakly nonlinear long-wave regime. Then they show that in this regime the discrete breather envelope is determined by a vector gap soliton of the limiting envelope equations via asymptotic analysis. Afterwards, they use the envelope theory to describe discrete breathers for SSH-coupling parameters corresponding to topologically trivial and, by exploiting an emergent symmetry, topologically nontrivial regimes, when the spectral gap is small. Their asymptotic theory indicates excellent agreement with extensive numerical simulations over a wide range of parameters. Analogous asymptotic and numerical results are obtained for the continuations from the anti-continuous regime for frequencies \(\omega_b\) below the acoustic or above the optical phonon bands.