Phase-Space Analysis of Elastic Vector Solitons in Flexible Mechanical Metamaterials

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to propose a revised continuum model from the discrete system introduced in [Deng et.al., PRL, 2017] . Using a Galilean transformation, we obtain an equation governing the soliton solutions in the phase plane - a second-order nonlinear ODE related to the Klein-Gordon equation with quadratic nonlinearity. These admit the well-known $\mathrm{sech}^2$ solutions, which we employ as an ans\"atz following [Deng et.al., PRL, 2017]. The resulting analysis yields soliton amplitudes and velocities that agree closely with numerical simulations, achieving an improvement of exactly 1/9 relative to the benchmark reported by the Harvard group.