Discreteness effects on a sine-Gordon breather

We employ collective-variable theory to describe the dynamics of a breather excitation in its center-of-mass frame in continuous and discrete systems of one spatial dimension. The exact equations of motion for the collective variable and coupled phonon field are derived for any system which supports breatherlike excitations that have even spatial parity where the collective variable represents half the distance between the breather subkinks. We then specialize the theory to the sine-Gordon (SG) case. For the continuum SG system we derive the exact effective potential in terms of the collective variable and discuss the relativistic effects on the breather subkinks which are quite different t…