Solitary waves in atomic chains and peridynamical media

Peridynamics describes the nonlinear interactions in spatially extended Hamiltonian systems by nonlocal integro-differential equations, which can be regarded as the natural generalization of lattice models. We prove the existence of solitary traveling waves for super-quadratic potentials by maximizing the potential energy subject to both a norm and a shape constraint. We also discuss the numerical computation of waves and study several asymptotic regimes.