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Jumps, cusps, and fractals in the solution of the periodic linear Benjamin–Ono equation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 July 2025

Lyonell Boulton
Affiliation:
Department of Mathematics and Maxwell Institute for the Mathematical Sciences, Heriot-Watt University, Riccarton, Edinburgh, UK (l.boulton@hw.ac.uk)
Breagh Macpherson
Affiliation:
Department of Mathematics and Maxwell Institute for the Mathematical Sciences, Heriot-Watt University, Riccarton, Edinburgh, UK (bm2024@hw.ac.uk)
Beatrice Pelloni*
Affiliation:
Department of Mathematics and Maxwell Institute for the Mathematical Sciences, Heriot-Watt University, Riccarton, Edinburgh, UK (b.pelloni@hw.ac.uk)
*
*Corresponding author.
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Abstract

We establish two complementary results about the regularity of the solution of the periodic initial value problem for the linear Benjamin–Ono equation. We first give a new simple proof of the statement that, for a dense countable set of the time variable, the solution is a finite linear combination of copies of the initial condition and of its Hilbert transform. In particular, this implies that discontinuities in the initial condition are propagated in the solution as logarithmic cusps. We then show that, if the initial condition is of bounded variation (and even if it is not continuous), for almost every time the graph of the solution in space is continuous but fractal, with upper Minkowski dimension equal to $\frac32$. In order to illustrate this striking dichotomy, in the final section, we include accurate numerical evaluations of the solution profile, as well as estimates of its box-counting dimension for two canonical choices of irrational time.

Information

Type
Research Article
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BY
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution and reproduction, provided the original article is properly cited.
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2025. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of The Royal Society of Edinburgh.
Figure 0

Figure 1. Solution of (1) for $u_0(x)={\mathbb m}{\mathbb{1}}_{[-\frac{\pi}{2},\frac{\pi}{2}]}(x)$ at time $t=2\pi\frac{1}{3}$ superimposed on the real and imaginary parts of the solution of (2). The cusp singularities in the solution of (1) correspond to jump singularities in either part of the solution of (2).

Figure 1

Figure 2. Solution for $\frac{t}{2\pi}$ a rational approximation of $\phi\sim\frac{p}{q}$ for $p=F_{16}=2584$ and $q=F_{15}=1597$. Note that $|\phi-\frac{p}{q}| \lt 1.7\times 10^{-6}$. The estimate of the box counting dimension is D = 1.54.

Figure 2

Figure 3. Solution for $\frac{t}{2\pi}$ a rational approximation of $\mathrm{e}\sim\frac{p}{q}$ for p = 23225 and q = 8544. Note that $|\mathrm{e}-\frac{p}{q}| \lt 6.7\times 10^{-9}$. The estimate of the box counting dimension is D = 1.46.

Figure 3

Algorithm 1. Function for counting the number of boxes of side ϵ required to cover the graph interpolated by the data $A = [x, y]$, where x and y are vectors of size N.