Interactions among different types of nonlinear waves described by the Kadomtsev-Petviashvili Equation

Abstract: In nonlinear physics, the interactions among solitons are well studied thanks to the multiple soliton solutions can be obtained by various effective methods. However, it is very difficult to study interactions among different types of nonlinear waves such as the solitons (or solitary waves), the cnoidal periodic waves and Painlev\'e waves. In this paper, the nonlocal symmetries related to the Darboux transformations (DT) of the Kadomtsev-Petviashvili (KP) equation is localized after imbedding the original system to an enlarged one. Then the DT is used to find the corresponding group invariant solutions such that interaction solutions among different types of nonlinear waves can be found. It is shown that starting from a Boussinesq wave or a KdV-type wave, which are two basic reductions of the KP equation, the essential and unique role of the DT is to add an additional soliton.