Solitons as candidates for energy carriers in Fermi-Pasta-Ulam lattices.

Currently, effective phonons (renormalized or interacting phonons) rather than solitary waves (for short, solitons) are regarded as the energy carriers in nonlinear lattices. In this work, by using the approximate soliton solutions of the corresponding equations of motion and adopting the Boltzmann distribution for these solitons, the average velocities of solitons are obtained and are compared with the sound velocities of energy transfer. Excellent agreements with the numerical results and the predictions of other existing theories are shown in both the symmetric Fermi-Pasta-Ulam-β lattices and the asymmetric Fermi-Pasta-Ulam-αβ lattices.