Breathers and rogue waves in a Heisenberg ferromagnetic spin chain or an alpha helical protein

In this paper, a fourth-order variable-coefficient nonlinear Schrödinger equation for a one-dimensional continuum anisotropic Heisenberg ferromagnetic spin chain or an alpha helical protein has been investigated. Breathers and rogue waves are constructed via the Darboux transformation and generalized Darboux transformation, respectively. Results of the breathers and rogue waves are presented: (1) The first- and second-order Akhmediev breathers and Kuznetsov–Ma solitons are presented with different values of variable coefficients which are related to the energy transfer or higher-order excitations and interactions in the helical protein, or related to the spin excitations resulting from the lowest order continuum approximation and octupole-dipole interaction in a Heisenberg ferromagnetic spin chain, and the nonlinear periodic breathers resulting from the Akhmediev breathers are studied as well; (2) For the first- and second-order rogue waves, we find that they can be split into many similar components when the variable coefficients are polynomial functions of time; (3) Rogue waves can also be split when the variable coefficients are hyperbolic secant functions of time, but the profile of each component in such a case is different.