Traveling and standing waves in coupled pendula and Newton's cradle

The existence of traveling and standing waves is investigated for chains of coupled pendula with periodic boundary conditions. The results are proven by applying topological methods to subspaces of symmetric solutions. The main advantage of this approach comes from the fact that only properties of the linearized forces are required. This allows to cover a wide range of models such as Newton’s cradle, the Fermi-Pasta-Ulam lattice and the Toda lattice.