Solitary wave solutions as a signature of the instability in the discrete nonlinear Schrödinger equation

The effect of instability on the propagation of solitary waves along one-dimensional discrete nonlinear Schrödinger equation with cubic nonlinearity is revisited. A self-contained quasicontinuum approximation is developed to derive closed-form expressions for small-amplitude solitary waves. The notion that the existence of nonlinear solitary waves in discrete systems is a signature of the modulation instability is used. With the help of this notion we conjecture that instability effects on moving solitons can be qualitative estimated from the analytical solutions. Results from numerical simulations are presented to support this conjecture.