Integrable reduction and solitons of the Fokas-Lenells equation

Abstract

Novel soliton structures are constructed for the Fokas-Lenells equation. In so doing, and after discussing the stability of continuous waves, a multiple scales perturbation theory is used to reduce the equation to a Korteweg-de Vries system whose relative soliton solution gives rise to intricate (and rather unexpected) solutions to the original system. Both the focusing and defocusing equations are considered and it is found that dark solitons may exist in both cases while in the focusing case antidark solitons are also possible. These findings are quite surprising as the relative nonlinear Schr\"odinger equation does not exhibit these solutions.