1. Introduction
Nonlinear differential difference equations (NDDEs) may describe many physical phenomena in nonlinear optics, biology, lattice dynamics, and electronics [
1,
2,
3]. One of the most famous integrable NDDEs is the Toda lattice system, which can describe the lattice motions dependent on the distance between particles and their nearest neighbors [
2,
3]. For a better understanding of this phenomenon, the reader can refer to the first figure in Reference [
3]; in that figure, the
N particles labeled from 1 to
N are connected by springs, which shows the interactions of the one-dimensional lattice at a fixed distance. Since the Toda lattice was proposed [
2,
3], the properties related to this equation have been widely studied, such as the related integrable hierarchy and Hamiltonian structures [
4], rational solutions [
5], complexiton solutions [
6], positon–negaton-type solutions [
7], mixed soliton–rational solutions [
8], soliton solutions [
9], and so on. Later, for the practical need of scientific research, researchers proposed other discrete equations related to the Toda lattice equation, such as the relativistic Toda lattice [
10], modified Toda lattice equation [
10,
11], and generalized Toda lattice equation [
12,
13], etc.
In this paper, we mainly investigate the following generalized Toda lattice equation [
12,
13] given by
where
,
,
are potential functions of variables
n and
t. When
, Equation (
1) degenerates to the famous Toda lattice equation. In References [
12,
13], the
Lax pair of Equation (
1) is given by
in which
represents the spectral parameter independent of time
t, the shift operator
E meets the condition
,
, and
is an eigenfunction vector solution of Equation (
1). The compatibility condition
of Lax pair (
2) yields Equation (
1). In Reference [
12], the Darboux transformation (DT) and exact one-soliton solutions of Equation (
1) are given.
Some methods for constructing the explicit exact solutions of the discrete integrable NDDEs have been presented and developed, such as the inverse scattering method [
14], discrete Hirota method [
15], classical Lie symmetry approach [
16,
17], and discrete DT method [
18,
19]. Among them, the Lie symmetry approach is a very effective method used to find the exact solutions of NDDEs and predict their integrability; its main idea is to decrease the order of NDDEs by using symmetry so as to obtain their exact solutions [
16,
17]. Moreover, the discrete DT method is also regarded as an effective means to solve Lax integrable NDDEs [
18,
19]. Recently, a discrete generalized
-fold DT related to
Lax pair has been proposed [
19], comparing with the usual DT, its main advantage is that it can give not only usual soliton solutions, but also rational solutions, as well as mixed solutions of usual soliton and rational solutions. In Reference [
20], this generalized method is extended to obtain exact solutions of the discrete coupled Ablowitz–Ladik equation from a
matrix spectral problem to
matrix spectral problem. In Reference [
21], this method is once again extended to the discrete generalized
-fold DT to obtain various exact solutions of a relativistic Toda lattice equation related to the
matrix spectral problem. However, this discrete generalized method has never been extended to solve the discrete integrable NDDEs related to the
Lax pair. Therefore, the main goal of this paper is to extend this technique to solve the Lax integrable NDDEs with
Lax pair, and we take Equation (
1) as an example and construct its discrete generalized
-fold DT to give some rational and mixed solutions.
This paper is structured as follows.
Section 2 presents the continuous limit of Equation (
1), from which Equation (
1) is converged to linear partial differential equations (PDEs) and nonlinear partial differential equations (NPDEs).
Section 3 shows the discrete generalized
-fold DT of Equation (
1) for the first time. In
Section 4, we obtain the first-order rational solutions and exponential–rational mixed solutions of Equation (
1) by using the discrete generalized
-fold DT, and we analyze the asymptotic states of the first-order rational solutions. Finally, the conclusions are presented in the last section.
2. Continuous Limit
Continuous limit may be regarded as a bridge between discrete equations and continuous equations. Through appropriate continuous limits, discrete NDDEs and continuous NPDEs can be transformed to each other [
22]. In this section, we will mainly investigate the continuous limit of Equation (
1). According to the appropriate approximation, we find that Equation (
1) can converge not only to a linear PDE, but also to an NPDE. Under the continuous conditions
Equation (
1) can be transformed to
which is just the linear PDEs when the fourth order terms of the infinitesimal
are neglected and
is written as time variable
t. Here,
is an arbitrary small parameter.
Moreover, under the limit conditions
Equation (
1) is equivalent to
which is just the NPDEs if we also ignore the fourth order terms of
and change
into time variable
t.
For the linear PDE (
4), we can easily discuss its properties, but the dynamical properties of nonlinear Equation (
6) have never been considered, which deserve further study.
3. Discrete Generalized (m, 3N − m)-Fold DT
In this section, the discrete generalized
-fold DT of Equation (
1) related to
Lax pair will be investigated. First of all, a special gauge transformation is considered as follows
then the Lax pair (
2) is transformed into the following forms
where the forms of
,
are the same as
,
, except that the old solutions
,
,
are replaced by the new ones
,
,
, respectively. To this end, we define a particular Darboux matrix
as
in which
N is an arbitrary positive integer, and
,
,
,
,
,
,
,
, and
are unknown functions of the variables
n and
t. If we choose appropriate values of
, the unknowns in
can be uniquely determined by a linear algebraic system of
equations
. In this linear algebraic system, we use the Taylor expansion of
by expanding
with
and the binomial expansion of
given by
, where the nonnegative integer
means the order number of the highest derivative used in the Taylor expansion of
.
Therefore, from the analysis above, we have the following discrete generalized DT theorem:
Theorem 1. Supposing Lax pair (2) has m different solutions with the spectral parameters (i = 1, 2,…,m), the following transformations are generated from the old solutions , , to the new ones , , withwherewith , , in which , , are given byand is derived by replacing the th column of determinant by the column vector with in which , , and are obtained by replacing the first, th and th columns of determinant by the column vector with in which , respectively, and is given by replacing the first column of determinant by the column vector with in which , where and are derived from and by changing n into and , respectively. Remark 1. Here, we refer to the transformations (7) and (9) using m spectral parameters as the discrete generalized -fold DT of Equation (1), in this term, m means the number of parameters we use, N represents the order number of DT, and represents the sum of the highest derivative used in Taylor expansion. When and , Theorem 1 degenerates to the discrete generalized -fold DT, which contains the usual DT [12], which can derive soliton solutions. When and , Theorem 1 becomes the discrete generalized -fold DT, which can give rational or semi-rational solutions as shown in the next part. When , we can obtain mixed solutions, which will not be discussed in detail in this paper to save space. Here, the detailed proof derivation process of Theorem 1 is omitted, and the readers can refer to the proof process and steps in References [12,18,19] and references therein to complete the proof of Theorem 1; therefore, we leave it as an exercise for the reader. Furthermore, in the next section, we can solve Equation (1) by using Theorem 1, and then bring these solutions into Equation (1) with the help of the symbolic calculation Maple, which can also verify the correctness of Theorem 1. 5. Conclusions
In this paper, we investigated the generalized Toda lattice Equation (
1) associated with a
Lax pair, which might model the motions of particles in lattices. The main achievements of this paper are as follows. Firstly, we corresponded Equation (
1) to continuous linear PDE (
4) and NPDE (
6) by using the continuous limit technique. Secondly, the discrete generalized
-fold DT of Equation (
1) was constructed for the first time, from which the rational solutions and exponential–rational mixed interaction solutions were obtained. Thirdly, the rational solutions of Equation (
1)were given by using the discrete generalized
-fold DT, and their limit states were discussed by using an asymptotic analysis. In order to better understand their dynamical properties, the three-dimensional and singular trajectory plots of rational solutions were also drawn in
Figure 1. Finally, the mixed solutions in the form of determinants of Equation (
1) were derived by use of the discrete generalized
-fold DT. The results and properties of Equation (
1) given above are first reported, and we hope these results in this paper might be helpful to understand the dynamics of particles in lattices.