  We study the dynamics of the "externally" forced and damped Fermi-Pasta-Ulam
(FPU) 1D lattice. The forcing has the spatial symmetry of the Fourier mode with
wavenumber p and oscillates sinusoidally in time with the frequency omega. When
omega is in the phonon band, the p-mode becomes modulationally unstable above a
critical forcing, which we determine analytically in terms of the parameters of
the system. For omega above the phonon band, the instability of the p-mode
leads to the formation of a travelling multibreather, that, in the
low-amplitude limit could be described in terms of soliton solutions of a
suitable driven-damped nonlinear Schroedinger (NLS) equation. Similar
mechanisms of instability could show up in easy-axis magnetic structures, that
are governed by such NLS equations.
