Moving discrete breathers in a Klein–Gordon chain with an impurity

Abstract

We analyse the influence of an impurity in the evolution of moving discrete breathers in a Klein–Gordon chain with non-weak nonlinearity. Three different types of behaviour can be observed when moving breathers interact with the impurity: they pass through the impurity continuing their direction of movement; they are reflected by the impurity; they are trapped by the impurity, giving rise to chaotic breathers, as their Fourier power spectra show. Resonance with a breather centred at the impurity site is conjectured to be a necessary condition for the appearance of the trapping phenomenon. This paper establishes a difference between the resonance condition of the non-weak nonlinearity approach and the resonance condition with the linear impurity mode in the case of weak nonlinearity.