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Travelling waves in woodpile chains are typically nanoptera, which are composed of a central solitary wave and exponentially small oscillations. These oscillations have been studied using exponential asymptotic methods, which typically require an explicit form for the leading-order behaviour. For many nonlinear systems, such as granular woodpile chains, it is not possible to calculate the leading-order solution explicitly. We show that accurate asymptotic approximations can be obtained using numerical approximation in place of the exact leading-order behaviour. We calculate the oscillation behaviour for Toda woodpile chains, and compare the results to exponential asymptotics based on tanh-fitting, Pad\'{e} approximants, and the adaptive Antoulas-Anderson (AAA) method. The AAA method is shown to produce the most accurate predictions of the amplitude of the oscillations and the mass ratios for which the oscillations vanish. This method is then applied to study granular woodpile chains, including chains with Hertzian interactions -- this method is able to calculate behaviour that could not be accurately approximated in previous studies., Comment: 24 pages, 17 figures, 1 table

We use exponential asymptotics to study travelling waves in woodpile systems modelled as singularly perturbed granular chains with zero precompression and small mass ratio. These systems are strongly nonlinear, and there is no analytic expression for their leading-order solution. We instead obtain an approximated leading-order solution using a hybrid numerical-analytic method. We show that travelling waves in these nonlinear woodpile systems are typically "nanoptera", or travelling waves with exponentially small but non-decaying oscillatory tails which appear as a Stokes curve is crossed. We demonstrate that travelling wave solutions in the zero precompression regime contain two Stokes curves, and hence two sets of tailing oscillations in the solution. We calculate the behaviour of these oscillations explicitly, and show that there exist system configurations which cause the oscillations to cancel entirely, producing solitary wave behaviour. We then study the behaviour of travelling waves in woodpile chains as precompression is increased, and show that there exists a value of the precompression above which the two Stokes curves coalesce into a single curve, meaning that cancellation of the tailing oscillations no longer occurs. This is consistent with previous studies, which showed that cancellation does not occur in chains with strong precompression., Comment: 21 pages, 9 figures

We study ``nanoptera'', which are non-localized solitary waves with exponentially small but non-decaying oscillations, in two singularly-perturbed Hertzian chains with precompression. These two systems are woodpile chains (which we model as systems of Hertzian particles and springs) and diatomic Hertzian chains with alternating masses. We demonstrate that nanoptera arise from Stokes phenomena and appear as special curves, called Stokes curves, are crossed in the complex plane. We use techniques from exponential asymptotics to obtain approximations of the oscillation amplitudes. Our analysis demonstrates that traveling waves in a singularly perturbed woodpile chain have a single Stokes curve, across which oscillations appear. Comparing these asymptotic predictions with numerical simulations reveals that this accurately describes the non-decaying oscillatory behavior in a woodpile chain. We perform a similar analysis of a diatomic Hertzian chain, that the nanpteron solution has two distinct exponentially small oscillatory contributions. We demonstrate that there exists a set of mass ratios for which these two contributions cancel to produce localized solitary waves. This result builds on prior experimental and numerical observations that there exist mass ratios that support localized solitary waves in diatomic Hertzian chains without precompression. Comparing asymptotic and numerical results in a diatomic Hertzian chain with precompression reveals that our exponential asymptotic approach accurately predicts the oscillation amplitude for a wide range of system parameters, but it fails to identify several values of the mass ratio that correspond to localized solitary-wave solutions., Comment: 29 pages, 9 figures

We investigate the generation and propagation of solitary waves in the context of the Hertz chain and Toda lattice, with the aim to highlight the similarities, as well as differences between these systems. We begin by discussing the kinetic and potential energy of a solitary wave in these systems, and show that under certain circumstances the kinetic and potential energy profiles in these systems (i.e., their spatial distribution) look reasonably close to each other. While this and other features, such as the connection between the amplitude and the total energy of the wave bear similarities between the two models, there are also notable differences, such as the width of the wave. We then study the dynamical behavior of these systems in response to an initial velocity impulse. For the Toda lattice, we do so by employing the inverse scattering transform, and we obtain analytically the ratio between the energy of the resulting solitary wave and the energy of the impulse, as a function of the impulse velocity; we then compare the dynamics of the Toda system to that of the Hertz system, for which the corresponding quantities are obtained through numerical simulations. In the latter system, we obtain a universality in the fraction of the energy stored in the resulting solitary traveling wave irrespectively of the size of the impulse. This fraction turns out to only depend on the nonlinear exponent. Finally, we investigate the relation between the velocity of the resulting solitary wave and the velocity of the impulse. In particular, we provide an alternative proof for the numerical scaling rule of Hertz type systems., Comment: 21 pages, 12 figures

We address the degree of universality of the Fermi-Pasta-Ulam recurrence induced by multisoliton fission from a harmonic excitation by analysing the case of the semiclassical defocusing nonlinear Schrodinger equation, which models nonlinear wave propagation in a variety of physical settings. Using a suitable Wentzel-Kramers-Brillouin approach to the solution of the associated scattering problem we accurately predict, in full analytical way, the number and the features (amplitude and velocity) of soliton-like excitations emerging post-breaking, as a function of the dispersion smallness parameter. This also permits to predict and analyse the near-recurrences, thereby inferring the universal character of the mechanism originally discovered for the Korteweg-deVries equation. We show, however, that important differences exist between the two models, arising from the different scaling rules obeyed by the soliton velocities., Comment: 11 pages, 7 figures, to appear in Phys. Rev. E