The Gaussian semiclassical soliton ensemble and numerical methods for the focusing nonlinear Schrödinger equation

Abstract: We report on a number of careful numerical experiments motivated by the semiclassical (zero-dispersion, \epsilon\downarrow 0) limit of the focusing nonlinear Schr\"odinger equation. Our experiments are designed to study the evolution of a particular family of perturbations of the initial data. These asymptotically small perturbations are precisely those that result from modifying the initial-data by using formal approximations to the spectrum of the associated spectral problem; such modified data has always been a standard part of the analysis of zero-dispersion limits of integrable systems. However, in the context of the focusing nonlinear Schr\"odinger equation, the ellipticity of the Whitham equations casts some doubt on the validity of this procedure. To carry out our experiments, we introduce an implicit finite difference scheme for the partial differential equation, and we validate both the proposed scheme and the standard split-step scheme against a numerical implementation of the inverse scattering transform for a special case in which the scattering data is known exactly. As part of this validation, we also investigate the use of the Krasny filter which is sometimes suggested as appropriate for nearly ill-posed problems such as we consider here. Our experiments show that that the O(\epsilon) rate of convergence of the modified data to the true data is propagated to positive times including times after wave breaking.