Description of the inelastic collision of two solitary waves for the BBM equation (Q982289)

This work is concerned with some properties of solitary wave in Benjamin-Bona-Mahoney (BBM) equation. This equation describes approximately the unidirectional propagation of long surface waves of small amplitude in water. Unlike the similar Korteweg-de Vries (KdV) equation, BBM equation is not completely integrable. Hence it is not prone to the application of the powerful inverse scattering transform method to find its evolutionary solutions. However, in studying its qualitative behaviour without resorting to its integrability this distinction evaporates and methods developed for KdV equation can be directly applied to BBM equation. It is known that BBM equation admits a two-parameter unidirectionally propagating solitary wave as a travelling wave solution. They are actually not solitons because they cannot recover exactly their identities after collisions. The authors thus consider the inelastic collision of two solitary waves. By resorting to a perturbative approach, they analyse approximately this process and after lengthy and cumbersome calculations they give a description of the collision phenomenon, namely, they evaluate the changes of size of the solitary waves and shifts in their trajectories. They also show that the collision is almost elastic if one of the solitary waves is small in the energy space and they give an estimate of the nonzero residue due to the collision.