Breaking of solitary and periodic nonlinear waves

A nontrivial behaviour of a nonlinear wave under influence of small disturbing factors like dissipation, smooth inhomogeneity of medium parameters, etc. is considered by the example of sine-Gordon equation. The stage of slow “adiabatic” variation of the parameters of quasi-stationary wave is shown to change at some finite distance due to strong instability. The wave form becomes essentially non-stationary (breaking of stationary wave structure). The breaking condition is defined by the extremum of the wave adiabatic invariant. The behaviour of a wave at the nonadiabatic stage is described using a Galerkin procedure.