Wavepacket preservation under nonlinear evolution (Q930575)

The authors of this very interesting paper study a Cauchy problem to the nonlinear hyperbolic system of PDE's in \(\mathbb R^d\), \( \partial_t\mathbf U =-(i/\varrho )\mathbf L(-i\nabla )\mathbf U + F(U)\), with initial data \(\mathbf U(r,0)=\mathbf h(r)\) at \(\tau =0\), \(\mathbf r\in \mathbb R^d\), where \(\mathbf U=U(r,\tau )\) is a \(2J\) dimensional complex vector, \(\mathbf L(-i\nabla )\) is a linear self-adjoint differential (pseudodifferential) operator with constant coefficients with the symbol \(\mathbf L(\mathbf k)\), which is a Hermitian \(2J\times 2J\) matrix, \(\mathbf F\) is a polynomial that \(\mathbf F(0)=0\), \(\mathbf F'(0)=0\) and \(\mathbf F(U)\) is translation-invariant, \(\mathbf h=h(r)\) is assumed to be the sum of a finite number of wavepackets \(\mathbf h_{l}\) (\(l=1,\dots,N\)), \(\varrho >0\) is a small parameter. This system describes wave propagation in dispersive nonlinear media such as, for example, electromagnetic waves in nonlinear photonic crystals. The wavepackets and the medium nonlinearity are characterized by two principal small parameters \(\beta \) and \(\varrho \). The quantity \(1/\beta \) is a factor describing spatial extension of involved wavepackets, and \(1/\varrho \) describes the relative magnitude of the linear part of the evolution equation compared to its nonlinearity. The main result is that the evolution of a multi-wavepacket could be described with high accuracy by a properly constructed system of differential equations with a universal nonlinearity that is obtained by a time averaging applied to the original nonlinearity. In simpler cases the averaged system turns into a system of Nonlinear Schroedinger equations.