Analysis of soliton interactions of modified Korteweg-de Vries equation using conserved quantities

Abstract

Abstract In this paper, the conservative quantities are used to develop an approximate method to calculate the merged waveform shape of the solitary waves described by modified Korteweg–de Vries (mKdV) equation. With this method, we can efficiently and effectively capture the physics of the complicated merging phenomena when two solitary waves described by the nonlinear evolution partial differential equation merge at the maximum without the need to solve the equation in detail. This offers a simple and robust tool to analyse the interactions between solitons and to benchmark the results obtained by the asymptotic and numerical methods. It is expected that the approximate analysis demonstrated in this paper can be applied to a series of nonlinear evolution equations to simulate various solitary wave interaction problems. In future, our goal is to extend this simple method to other nonlinear wave evolution phenomena.