Modulation instability analysis, optical and other solutions to the modified nonlinear Schrödinger equation

Abstract This paper studies the new families of exact traveling wave solutions with the modified nonlinear Schrödinger equation, which models the propagation of rogue waves in ocean engineering. The extended Fan sub-equation method with five parameters is used to find exact traveling wave solutions. It has been observed that the equation exhibits a collection of traveling wave solutions for limiting values of parameters. This method is beneficial for solving nonlinear partial differential equations, because it is not only useful for finding the new exact traveling wave solutions, but also gives us the solutions obtained previously by the usage of other techniques (Riccati equation, or first-kind elliptic equation, or the generalized Riccati equation as mapping equation, or auxiliary ordinary differential equation method) in a combined approach. Moreover, by means of the concept of linear stability, we prove that the governing model is stable. 3D figures are plotted for showing the physical behavior of the obtained solutions for the different values of unknown parameters with constraint conditions.