Soliton mobility in disordered lattices.

We investigate soliton mobility in the disordered Ablowitz-Ladik (AL) model and the standard nonlinear Schrödinger (NLS) lattice with the help of an effective potential generalizing the Peierls-Nabarro potential. This potential results from a deviation from integrability, which is due to randomness for the AL model, and both randomness and lattice discreteness for the NLS lattice. The statistical properties of such a potential are analyzed, and it is shown how the soliton mobility is affected by its size. The usefulness of this effective potential in studying soliton dynamics is demonstrated numerically. Furthermore, we propose two ways to enhance soliton transport in the presence of disorder: one is to use specific realizations of randomness, and the other is to consider a specific soliton pair.