On small breathers of nonlinear Klein-Gordon equations via exponentially small homoclinic splitting
摘要
Breathers are nontrivial time-periodic and spatially localized solutions of nonlinear dispersive partial differential equations (PDEs). Families of breathers have been found for certain integrable PDEs but are believed to be rare in non-integrable ones such as nonlinear Klein-Gordon equations. In this paper we show that small amplitude breathers of any temporal frequency do not exist for semilinear Klein-Gordon equations with generic analytic odd nonlinearities. A breather with small amplitude exists only when its temporal frequency is close to be resonant with the linear Klein-Gordon dispersion relation. Our main result is that, for such frequencies, we rigorously identify the leading order term in the exponentially small (with respect to the small amplitude) obstruction to the existence of small breathers in terms of the so-called Stokes constant, which depends on the nonlinearity analytically, but is independent of the frequency. This gives a rigorous justification of a formal asymptotic argument by Kruskal and Segur (Phys. Rev. Lett. 58(8):747,