English

Gurevich-Pitaevskii problem and its development

Pattern Formation and Solitons 2021-05-26 v1

Abstract

We present an introduction to the theory of dispersive shock waves in the framework of the approach proposed by Gurevich and Pitaevskii (Zh. Eksp. Teor. Fiz., 65, 590 (1973) [Sov. Phys. JETP, 38, 291 (1974)]) based on the Whitham theory of modulation of nonlinear waves. We explain how Whitham equations for a periodic solution can be derived for the Korteweg-de Vries equation and outline some elementary methods to solve them. We illustrate this approach with solutions to the main problems discussed by Gurevich and Pitaevskii. We consider a generalization of the theory to systems with weak dissipation and discuss the theory of dispersive shock waves for the Gross-Pitaevskii equation.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2104.14835,
  title  = {Gurevich-Pitaevskii problem and its development},
  author = {A. M. Kamchatnov},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2104.14835},
  year   = {2021}
}

Comments

38 pages, 18 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-24T01:39:45.991Z