Traveling kinks in cubic nonlinear Ginzburg-Landau equations.

Nonlinear cubic Euler-Lagrange equations of motion in the traveling variable are usually derived from Ginzburg-Landau free energy functionals frequently encountered in several fields of physics. Many authors considered in the past damped versions of such equations, with the damping term added by hand simulating the friction due to the environment. It is known that even in this damped case kink solutions can exist. By means of a factorization method, we provide analytic formulas for several possible kink solutions of such equations of motion in the undriven and constant field driven cases, including the recently introduced Riccati parameter kinks, which were not considered previously in such a context. The latter parameter controls the delay of the switching stage of the kinks. The delay is caused by antikink components that are introduced in the structure of the solution through this parameter.

Supersymmetric pairing of kinks for polynomial nonlinearities.

We show how one can obtain kink solutions of ordinary differential equations with polynomial nonlinearities by an efficient factorization procedure directly related to the factorization of their nonlinear polynomial part. We focus on reaction-diffusion equations in the traveling frame and damped-anharmonic-oscillator equations. We also report an interesting pairing of the kink solutions, a result obtained by reversing the factorization brackets in the supersymmetric quantum-mechanical style. In this way, one gets ordinary differential equations with a different polynomial nonlinearity possessing kink solutions of different width but propagating at the same velocity as the kinks of the original equation. This pairing of kinks could have many applications. We illustrate the mathematical procedure with several important cases, among which are the generalized Fisher equation, the FitzHugh-Nagumo equation, and the polymerization fronts of microtubules.