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 [45].