Travelling Breathers in Klein-Gordon Lattices as Homoclinic Orbits to <Emphasis Type="BoldItalic">p</Emphasis>-Tori

Klein-Gordon chains are one-dimensional lattices of nonlinear oscillators in an anharmonic on-site potential, linearly coupled with their first neighbors. In this paper, we study the existence in such networks of spatially localized solutions, which appear time periodic in a referential in translation at constant velocity. These solutions are called travelling breathers. In the case of travelling wave solutions, the existence of exact solutions has been obtained by Iooss and Kirchgässner. Formal multiscale expansions have been used by Remoissenet to derive approximate solutions of travelling breathers in the form of modulated plane waves. James and Sire have studied the existence of specific travelling breather solutions, consisting in pulsating travelling waves which are exactly translated of 2 lattice sites after a fixed propagation time T. In this paper, we generalize this approach to pulsating travelling waves which are exactly translated of p≥ 3 sites after a given time T p being arbitrary. By formulating the problem as a dynamical system, one is able to reduce the system locally to a finite dimensional set of ordinary differential equations (ODE), whose dimension depends on the parameter values of the problem. We prove that the principal part of this system of ODE admits homoclinic connections to p-tori under general conditions on the potential. One can obtain leading order approximations of these homoclinic connections and these orbits should correspond, for the oscillator chain, to small amplitude travelling breather solutions superposed on an exponentially small quasi-periodic tail.