EVENT DETAILS AND ABSTRACT

Title: Dissipative solitons in physical systems
Speaker: H.-G. Purwins
Speaker Info: University of Muenster, Germany
Brief Description:
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Abstract:

Spatially extended nonlinear physical, chemical, biological and other dissipative systems exhibit an overwhelming variety of self- organized patterns. The understanding of these patterns is one of the great challenges of modern science. Among the observed structures rather robust well-localized solitary patterns with particle like behaviour are of particular interest. These objects that we refer to as dissipative solitons undergo scattering, formation of “molecules”, generation and annihilation. In addition they can serve as elementary constituents of patterns of higher complexity. Dissipative solitons have been studied experimentally in planar gas-discharge systems in an exemplary way and theoretically in terms of a simple reaction-diffusion model. In this way an understanding of the mechanisms of formation, stabilization, propagation and interaction becomes possible. A mathematical foundation for the particle picture can be given by reducing the model equations to a set of ordinary differential equations containing the centre coordinates of dissipative solitons. It can be demonstrated that dissipative solitons behave similar in very different dissipative systems therefore attracting considerable interest in natural sciences and their application.