Adiabatic behavior of sine-Gordon solitons in the presence of perturbations

The behavior of sine-Gordon solitons in the presence of weak perturbations is considered. The procedure is based on the exact inverse scattering solution of the unperturbed sine-Gordon equation. Accounting for perturbations such as those arising from impurities, external forces as well damping and spatially inhomogeneous frequencies the corresponding perturbed operator equation can be solved by the Green's function technique if one expands the Green's operator in terms of a set of biorthogonal eigenfunctions. Ordinary linear differential equations prescribing the time evolution of the scattering data are obtained. Instead of solving the inverse scattering problem completely the adiabatic assumption is then used anticipating the result that solitons maintain their integrity to a high degree. Explicit solutions for the one-soliton dynamics are presented.Work supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft through the Sonderforschungsbereich Nr. 162 Plasmaphysik Bochum/Jülich