Paper detail

Solitary waves and $N$-particle algorithms for a class of Euler-Poincaré equations

We study a class of partial differential equations (PDEs) in the family of the so-called Euler-Poincaré differential systems, with the aim of developing a foundation for numerical algorithms of their solutions. This requires particular attention to the mathematical properties of this system when the associated class of elliptic operators possesses non-smooth kernels. By casting the system in its Lagrangian (or characteristics) form, we first formulate a particles system algorithm in free space with homogeneous Dirichlet boundary conditions for the evolving fields. We next examine the deformation of the system when non-homogeneous "constant stream" boundary conditions are assumed. We show how this simple change at the boundary deeply affects the nature of the evolution, from hyperbolic-like to dispersive with a non-trivial dispersion relation, and examine the potentially regularizing properties of singular kernels offered by this deformation. From the particle algorithm viewpoint, kernel singularities affect the existence and uniqueness of solutions to the corresponding ordinary differential equations systems. We illustrate this with the case when the operator kernel assumes a conical shape over the spatial variables, and examine in detail two-particle dynamics under the resulting lack of Lipschitz-continuity. Curiously, we find that for the conically-shaped kernels the motion of the related two-dimensional waves can become completely integrable under appropriate initial data. This reduction projects the two-dimensional system to the one-dimensional completely integrable Shallow-Water equation [Camassa, R. and Holm, D. D., Phys. Rev. Lett., 71, 1961-1964, 1993], while retaining the full dependence on two spatial dimensions for the single channel solutions.