The aims of this letter are three-fold: First is to show that nonlinear generalizations of electrodynamics support various types of knotted solutions in vacuum. The solutions are universal in the sense that they do not depend on the specific Lagrangi
an density, at least if the latter gives rise to a well-posed theory. Second is to describe the interaction between probe waves and knotted background configurations. We show that the qualitative behaviour of this interaction may be described in terms of Robinson congruences, which appear explicitly in the causal structure of the theory. Finally, we argue that optical arrangements endowed with intense background fields could be the natural place to look for the knots experimentally.
We investigate the evolutionary aspects of some integrable soliton models whose Lagrangians are derived from the pullback of a volume-form to a two-dimensional target space. These models are known to have infinitely many conserved quantities and supp
ort various types of exact analytic solutions with nontrivial topology. In particular, we show that, in spite of the fact that they admit nice smooth solutions, wave propagation about these solutions will always be ill-posed. This is related to the fact that the corresponding Euler-Lagrange equations are not of hyperbolic type.
We discuss several features of the propagation of perturbations in nonlinear scalar field theories using the effective metric. It is shown that the effective metric can be classified according to whether the gradient of the scalar field is timelike,
null, or spacelike, and this classification is illustrated with two examples. We shall also show that different signatures for the effective metric are allowed.
A free massive scalar field in inhomogeneous random media is investigated. The coefficients of the Klein-Gordon equation are taken to be random functions of the spatial coordinates. The case of an annealed-like disordered medium, modeled by centered
stationary and Gaussian processes, is analyzed. After performing the averages over the random functions, we obtain the two-point causal Greens function of the model up to one-loop. The disordered scalar quantum field theory becomes qualitatively similar to a $lambdaphi^{4}$ self-interacting theory with a frequency-dependent coupling.
