Rogue waves arising on the standing periodic waves in the Ablowitz–Ladik equation

Abstract We study the standing periodic waves in the semidiscrete integrable system modeled by the Ablowitz–Ladik (AL) equation. We have related the stability spectrum to the Lax spectrum by separating the variables and by finding the characteristic polynomial for the standing periodic waves. We have also obtained rogue waves on the background of the modulationally unstable standing periodic waves by using the end points of spectral bands and the corresponding eigenfunctions. The magnification factors for the rogue waves have been computed analytically and compared with their continuous counterparts. The main novelty of this work is that we explore a nonstandard linear Lax system, which is different from the standard Lax representation of the AL equation.