Bifurcations of travelling wave solutions in a new integrable equation with peakon and compactons (Q813753)

This paper studies travelling wave solutions of the nonlinear wave equation \[ u_t-u_{txx}+(b+1)u u_x=bu_x u_{xx}+uu_{xxx}, \] which includes as particular cases the dispersionless Camassa-Holm equation (\(b=2\)) and the Degasperis-Procesi equation (\(b=3\)). The study of travelling waves is reduced to investigation of the phase portrait a pair of ordinary differential equations, depending on some parameters. A detailed analysis is performed, revealing the existence of a variety of travelling waves: periodic waves, solitary waves, peakons and compactons. In particular the analysis elucidates the reasons for appearance of non-smooth travelling waves (the peakons and the compactons), and shows that they are obtained as limits of smooth travelling waves. Some explicit expressions of various travelling waves in terms of elliptic functions are also given.