The study of nonlinear dynamics has been an active area of research since 1960s, after certain path-breaking discoveries, leading to the concepts of solitons, integrability, bifurcations, chaos and spatio-temporal patterns, to name a few. Several new techniques and methods have been developed to understand nonlinear systems at different levels. Along with these, a multitude of potential applications of nonlinear dynamics have also been enunciated. In spite of these developments, several challenges, some of them fundamental and others on the efficacy of these methods in developing cutting edge technologies, remain to be tackled. In this article, a brief personal perspective of these issues is presented.

In this paper, we study the formation of solitons, their propagation and collision behaviour in an integrable multicomponent (2+1)-dimensional long wave–short wave resonance interaction (𝑀-LSRI) system. First, we briefly revisit the earlier results on the dynamics of bright solitons and demonstrate the fascinating energy exchange collision of bright solitons appearing in the short-wave components of the 𝑀-LSRI system. Then, we explicitly construct the exact one-and two-multicomponent dark soliton solutions of the 𝑀-LSRI system by using the Hirota’s direct method and explore its propagation dynamics. Also, we study the features of dark soliton collisions.

Different types of breathers and rogue waves (RWs) are some of the important coherent structures which have been recently realized in several physical phenomena in hydrodynamics, nonlinear optics, Bose–Einstein condensates, etc. Mathematically, they have been deduced in non-linear Schrödinger (NLS) equations. Here we show the existence of general breathers, Akhmediev breathers, Ma soliton and rogue wave solutions in coupled Manakov-type NLS equations and coupled generalized NLS equations representing four-wave mixing. We deduce their explicit forms using Hirota bilinearization procedure and bring out their exact structures and important properties. We also show the method to deduce the various breather solutions from rogue wave solutions using factorization form and the so-called imbricate series.

The evolution equation of a ferromagnetic spin system described by Heisenberg nearest-neighbour interaction is given by Landau–Lifshitz–Gilbert (LLG) equation, which is a fascinating nonlinear dynamical system. For a nanomagnetic trilayer structure (spin valve or pillar) an additional torque term due to spin-polarized current has been suggested by Slonczewski, which gives rise to a rich variety of dynamics in the free layer. Under appropriate conditions the spin-polarized current gives a time-varying resistance to the magnetic structure thereby inducing magnetization oscillations of frequency which lies in the microwave region. Such a device is called a spin transfer nanooscillator (STNO). However, this interesting nanoscale level source of microwaves lacks efficiency due to its low emitting power typically of the order of nWs. To over-come this difficulty, one has to consider the collective dynamics of synchronized arrays/networks of STNOs as suggested by Fert and coworkers so that the power can be enhanced 𝑁² times that of a single STNO. We show that this goal can be achieved by applying a common microwave magnetic field to an array of STNOs. In order to make the system technically more feasible to practical level integration with CMOS circuits, we establish suitable electrical connections between the oscillators. Although the electrical connection makes the system more complex, the applied microwave magnetic field drives the system to synchronization in large regions of parameter space.