Fractional nonlinear surface impurity in a 2D lattice

Abstract: We study the formation of localized modes around a generalized nonlinear impurity which is located at the boundary of a semi-infinite square lattice, and where we replace the standard discrete Laplacian by a fractional one, characterized by a fractional exponent $0<\alpha<1$ where $\alpha=1$ marks the standard, non-fractional case. We specialize to two impurity cases: impurity at an "edge" and impurity at a "corner" and use the formalism of lattice Green functions to obtain in closed form the bound state energy and its mode amplitude. It is found that, for any fractional exponent and for impurity strengths above a certain threshold, there is always a single bound state for the linear impurity, while for the nonlinear (cubic) case, up to two bound states are possible. At small fractional exponents, the energy of the impurity mode becomes directly proportional to the impurity strength.