We have decided to discontinue the publication of preprints on our preprint server as of 1 March 2024. The publication culture within mathematics has changed so much due to the rise of repositories such as ArXiV (www.arxiv.org) that we are encouraging all institute members to make their preprints available there. An institute's repository in its previous form is, therefore, unnecessary. The preprints published to date will remain available here, but we will not add any new preprints here.
MiS Preprint
57/2007
Numerical study of a multiscale expansion of the Korteweg de Vries equation
Tamara Grava and Christian Klein
Abstract
The Cauchy problem for the Korteweg de Vries (KdV) equation with small dispersion of order $\epsilon^2$, $\epsilon\ll 1$, is characterized by the appearance of a zone of rapid modulated oscillations. These oscillations are approximately described by the elliptic solution of KdV where the amplitude, wave-number and frequency are not constant but evolve according to the Whitham equations. Whereas the difference between the KdV and the asymptotic solution decreases as $\epsilon$ in the interior of the Whitham oscillatory zone, it is known to be only of order $\epsilon^{1/3}$ near the leading edge of this zone. To obtain a more accurate description near the leading edge of the oscillatory zone we present a multiscale expansion of the solution of KdV in terms of the Hastings-McLeod solution of the Painlevé-II equation. We show numerically that the resulting multiscale solution approximates the KdV solution, in the small dispersion limit, to the order $\epsilon^{2/3}$.
