Lax pair, conservation laws, Darboux transformation, breathers and rogue waves for the coupled nonautonomous nonlinear Schrödinger system in an inhomogeneous plasma

Abstract Plasmas are believed to be possibly “the most abundant form of ordinary matter in the Universe”. In this paper, a coupled nonautonomous nonlinear Schrodinger system is investigated, which describes the propagation of two envelope solitons in a weakly inhomogeneous plasma with the t-dependent linear and parabolic density profiles and nonconstant collisional damping. Lax pair with the nonisospectral parameter and infinitely-many conservation laws are derived. Based on the Lax pair, the Nth-step Darboux transformation is constructed. Utilizing the Nth-step Darboux transformation, we obtain the breather and rogue wave solutions, and find that the amplitude of the nonzero background is nonconstant and dependent on the inhomogeneous coefficients in the system under investigation. Characteristics of the breathers and rogue waves are discussed, and effects of the inhomogeneous coefficients on the breathers and rogue waves are analyzed. Breathers and rogue waves with the dark or bright soliton together are also constructed and their characteristics are discussed. We find that the dark and bright solitons can coexist and generate the breather-like waves.