soliton
Sign in to saveAlso known as soliton wave
thumb|250px|Solitary wave (water waves)|Solitary wave in a laboratory [[wave channel]]
Wikidata facts
- Subclass of
- wave
- Image
- Soliton hydro.jpg
Show 5 more facts
- Stack Exchange tag
- physics.stackexchange.com/tags/solitons
- Commons category
- Solitons
- topic's main category
- Category:Solitons
- time of discovery or invention
- 1834-00-00
- discoverer or inventor
- John Scott Russell
via Wikidata · CC0
~20 min read
Encyclopedic overview
15 sectionsContents
- Definition
- Explanation
- History
- In fiber optics
- In biology
- In materials physics
- In magnets
- In nuclear physics
- Bions
- Alcubierre drive
- See also
- Notes
- References
- Further reading
- External links
thumb|250px|Solitary wave (water waves)|Solitary wave in a laboratory [[wave channel]]
In mathematics and physics, a soliton is a nonlinear, self-reinforcing, localized wave packet that is , in that it preserves its shape while propagating freely, at constant velocity, and recovers it even after collisions with other such localized wave packets. Its remarkable stability can be traced to a balanced cancellation of nonlinear and dispersive effects in the medium. Solitons were subsequently found to provide stable solutions of a wide class of weakly nonlinear dispersive partial differential equations describing physical systems.
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “soliton” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.