PHYSICS SEMINAR
THE SOLILOQUY OF THE SOLITON
Emilie Pelchat
Physics Department
Bishop's University
Friday, February 6, 2009
12:30 pm
Nicolls 1
The study of solitary waves, also known as solitons, has been around since the 1800s when a Scottish engineer observed strange behaviour of water waves in a canal. Since then, the phenomenon has been studied further and has been placed on more rigorous mathematical grounds. Furthermore, solitons have proved to be valuable mathematical objects in the study of other physical phenomena such as being the solution to certain non-linearequations. The stability of these solitonic solutions is remarkable and the fact that they are spatially localized makes them akin to particles. This talk will first present the basic idea of the solitary wave and then show how it can be generalized to higher-dimensional concepts such as topological solitons. Furthermore, it will be seen how the soliton solution can be extended to explain certain phenomena in superconductivity.
