On the Korteweg–de Vries Limit for the Fermi–Pasta–Ulam System

Abstract

In this paper, we develop dispersive PDE techniques for the Fermi–Pasta–Ulam (FPU) system with infinitely many oscillators, and we show that general solutions to the infinite FPU system can be approximated by counter-propagating waves governed by the Korteweg–de Vries (KdV) equation as the lattice spacing approaches zero. Our result not only simplifies the hypotheses but also reduces the regularity requirement in the previous study (Schneider and Wayne, In: International conference on differential equations, Berlin, 1999, World Sci. Publ, River Edge, NJ, Vol 1, 2, pp 390–404, 2000). © 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH, DE part of Springer Nature.