Solitons, chaos and fractals in the (2 + 1)-dimensional dispersive long wave equation

Abstract For a higher-dimensional integrable nonlinear dynamical system, there are abundant coherent soliton excitations. With the aid of a projective Riccati equation approach, the paper obtains several types of exact solutions to the (2 + 1)-dimensional dispersive long wave (DLW) equation which include multiple soliton solution, periodic soliton solution and Weierstrass function solution. Subsequently, several multisolitons are derived and some novel features are revealed by introducing lower-dimensional patterns.