SOLITARY WAVES IN AN ELASTIC STRING

It is well known that a genuinely nonlinear straight string can suppor t only trivial, constant stretch, traveling waves. We demonstrate that such a string preshaped into a rotating helix supports the propagatio n of subsonic solitons for any stress-strain relation. The properties of the resulting solitary wave depend on its sense of rotation versus the rotation of the free string as a rigid body. The cases of linear a nd quadratic stress-strain relations are considered explicitly.