Bright and dark breathers on an elliptic wave in the defocusing mKdV equation

Abstract: Breathers on an elliptic wave background consist of nonlinear superpositions of a soliton and a periodic wave, both traveling with different wave speeds and interacting periodically in the space-time. For the defocusing modified Korteweg-de Vries (mKdV) equation, the construction of general breathers has been an open problem since the elliptic wave is related to the elliptic degeneration of the hyperelliptic solutions of genus two. We have found the new representation of eigenfunctions of the Lax operator associated with the elliptic wave, which enables us to solve this open problem and to construct two families of breathers with bright (elevation) and dark (depression) profiles.