Kinks in dipole chains

Abstract

It is shown that the topological discrete sine-Gordon system introduced by Speight and Ward models the dynamics of an infinite uniform chain of electric dipoles constrained to rotate in a plane containing the chain. Such a chain admits a novel type of static kink solution which may occupy any position relative to the spatial lattice and experiences no Peierls–Nabarro barrier. Consequently the dynamics of a single kink is highly continuum-like, despite the strongly discrete nature of the model. Static multikinks and kink–antikink pairs are constructed, and it is shown that all such static solutions are unstable. Exact propagating kinks are sought numerically using the pseudo-spectral method, but it is found that none exist, except, perhaps, at very low speed.

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• Nonlinearity - View
• arXiv (Cornell University) - View - PDF
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