On inverse scattering for the one-dimensional nonlinear Dirac equation

Abstract

The inverse scattering problem for the one-dimensional nonlinear Dirac equation \begin{align*} \begin{cases} i(u_t+u_x)+v=\mathcal{N}_1(u,v),\\ i(v_t-v_x)+u=\mathcal{N}_2(u,v) \end{cases} \end{align*} is studied. We assume that the unknown nonlinearities $\mathcal{N}_j(u,v)$ ($j=1,2$) of the equation belong to $C^\infty(\mathbb{C}^2;\mathbb{C})$ and satisfy $(\partial_\mathbf{z}^\alpha \mathcal{N}_j)(\mathbf{z})=O(|\mathbf{z}|^{\max\{ 5-|\alpha|,0 \}})$ ($|\mathbf{z}|\to 0$) for any multi-index $\alpha \in (\mathbb{N} \cup \{ 0 \})^4$. Here, $\mathbf{z}=(z_1,z_2)\in \mathbb{C}^2$, $ \partial_\mathbf{z}^\alpha= (\partial_{z_1},\partial_{\overline{z_1}},\partial_{z_2},\partial_{\overline{z_2}})^\alpha, $ and $\partial_{z_1},\partial_{\overline{z_1}},\partial_{z_2},\partial_{\overline{z_2}}$ are the Wirtinger differential operators. Under some additional assumptions on $\mathcal{N}_j$, we establish a reconstruction formula for $(\partial_\mathbf{z}^\alpha \mathcal{N}_j)(0)$ ($|\alpha|\ge 5$) using the knowledge of the scattering operator for the equation. Although such results were established for the nonlinear Schr\"odinger equation [Sasaki 2024] and the nonlinear Klein-Gordon equation [Sasaki 2025], the methods in [Sasaki 2024, 2025] are not directly applicable to the nonlinear Dirac equation due to its system nature. Specifically, it is quite difficult to prove the invertibility of a matrix associated with the input data. To overcome this difficulty, we introduce a new method based on the massless limit for the free solutions.