Justification of the coupled mode asymptotics for localized wavepackets in the periodic nonlinear Schrödinger equation

We consider wavepackets composed of two modulated carrier Bloch waves with opposite group velocities in the one dimensional periodic Nonlinear Schrödinger/Gross-Pitaevskii equation. These can be approximated by first order coupled mode equations (CMEs) for the two slowly varying envelopes. Under a suitably selected periodic perturbation of the periodic structure the CMEs possess a spectral gap of the corresponding spatial operator and allow families of exponentially localized solitary waves parametrized by velocity. This leads to a family of approximate solitary waves in the periodic nonlinear Schrödinger equation. Besides a formal derivation of the CMEs a rigorous justification of the approximation and an error estimate in the supremum norm are provided. Several numerical tests corroborate the analysis.