N-fold Darboux transformation and exact solutions for the nonlocal Fokas–Lenells equation on the vanishing and plane wave backgrounds

Abstract In this paper, we propose and investigate the reverse-space–time nonlocal nonlinear Fokas–Lenells equation by the idea of Ablowitz and Musslimani. The reverse-space–time Fokas–Lenells equation, associated with a 2 × 2 matrix Lax pair, is the important integrable system, which can be reduced to the nonlocal Fokas–Lenells equation. Based on its Lax pair, we construct nonlocal version of N-fold Darboux transformation (DT) for the Fokas–Lenells equation, and obtain two kinds of soliton solutions from vanishing and plane wave backgrounds. Further some novel one-soliton and two-soliton are derived with the zero and nonzero seed solutions through complex computations, including the bright soliton, kink soliton and breather wave soliton. Moreover, various graphical analyses on the presented solutions are made to reveal the dynamic behaviors, which display the elastic interactions between two solitons and their amplitudes keeping unchanged after the interactions except for the phase shifts. It is clearly shown that these solutions have new properties which differ from ones of the classical Fokas–Lenells equation.