Compact and almost compact breathers: a bridge between an anharmonic lattice and its continuum limit

We demonstrate that certain strictly anharmonic one-dimensional FPU lattices with a suitable quartic site potential appended support almost-compact discrete breathers over a macroscopic localized domain that is essentially fixed independently of the sparseness of the lattice. Beyond that domain the discrete breather tails decay at a double-exponential rate in the lattice-cell index, becoming truly compact in the continuum limit. Furthermore, the discrete breather is stable for amplitudes below a sharp threshold that depends on the sparseness of the lattice. For the two-dimensional version of the problem, the continuum limit of a planar hexagonal lattice with a purely quartic interaction potential begets an isotropic multidimensional nonlinear wave equation. When a quartic site potential of the appropriate sign is appended, the continuum equation has a compactly supported radial breather solution.