Pattern Formation And Solitons

We investigate the linear stability of a thin, suspended, annular film of conducting fluid with a voltage difference applied between its inner and outer edges. For a sufficiently large voltage, such a film is unstable to radially-driven electroconvection due to charges which develop on its free surfaces. The film can also be subjected to a Couette shear by rotating its inner edge. This combination is experimentally realized using films of smectic A liquid crystals. In the absence of shear, the convective flow consists of a stationary, azimuthally one-dimensional pattern of symmetric, counter-rotating vortex pairs. When Couette flow is applied, an azimuthally traveling pattern results. When viewed in a co-rotating frame, the traveling pattern consists of pairs of asymmetric vortices. We calculate the neutral stability boundary for arbitrary radius ratio α and Reynolds number Re of the shear flow, and obtain the critical control parameter R c (α,Re) and the critical azimuthal mode number m c (α,Re) . The Couette flow suppresses the onset of electroconvection, so that R c (α,Re)> R c (α,0) . The calculated suppression is compared with experiments performed at α=0.56 and 0≤Re≤0.22 .

A suspended fluid film with two free surfaces convects when a sufficiently large voltage is applied across it. We present a linear stability analysis for this system. The forces driving convection are due to the interaction of the applied electric field with space charge which develops near the free surfaces. Our analysis is similar to that for the two-dimensional Bénard problem, but with important differences due to coupling between the charge distribution and the field. We find the neutral stability boundary of a dimensionless control parameter R as a function of the dimensionless wave number κ . R , which is proportional to the square of the applied voltage, is analogous to the Rayleigh number. The critical values R c and κ c are found from the minimum of the stability boundary, and its curvature at the minimum gives the correlation length ξ 0 . The characteristic time scale τ 0 , which depends on a second dimensionless parameter P , analogous to the Prandtl number, is determined from the linear growth rate near onset. ξ 0 and τ 0 are coefficients in the Ginzburg-Landau amplitude equation which describes the flow pattern near onset in this system. We compare our results to recent experiments.

A characterization of textured patterns, referred to as the disorder function \bar\delta(\beta), is used to study properties of patterns generated in the Swift-Hohenberg equation (SHE). It is shown to be an intensive, configuration-independent measure. The evolution of random initial states under the SHE exhibits two stages of relaxation. The initial phase, where local striped domains emerge from a noisy background, is quantified by a power law decay \bar\delta(\beta) \sim t^{-{1/2} \beta}. Beyond a sharp transition a slower power law decay of \bar\delta(\beta), which corresponds to the coarsening of striped domains, is observed. The transition between the phases advances as the system is driven further from the onset of patterns, and suitable scaling of time and \bar\delta(\beta) leads to the collapse of distinct curves. The decay of δ ¯ (β) during the initial phase remains unchanged when nonvariational terms are added to the underlying equations, suggesting the possibility of observing it in experimental systems. In contrast, the rate of relaxation during domain coarsening increases with the coefficient of the nonvariational term.

Discrete breathers are time-periodic, spatially localized solutions of equations of motion for classical degrees of freedom interacting on a lattice. They come in one-parameter families. We report on studies of energy properties of breather families in one-, two- and three-dimensional lattices. We show that breather energies have a positive lower bound if the lattice dimension of a given nonlinear lattice is greater than or equal to a certain critical value. These findings could be important for the experimental detection of discrete breathers.

Exact solitary wave solutions of the one-dimensional quintic complex Ginzburg-Landau equation are obtained using a method derived from the Painlevé test for integrability. These solutions are expressed in terms of hyperbolic functions, and include the pulses and fronts found by van Saarloos and Hohenberg. We also find previously unknown sources and sinks. The emphasis is put on the systematic character of the method which breaks away from approaches involving somewhat ad hoc Ansätze.

Dissipationless shock waves in modulational unstable one-dimensional medium are investigated on the simplest example of integrable focusing nonlinear Schr\''odinger (NS) equation. Our approach is based on the construction of special exact solution of the Whitham-NS system, which ''partially saturates'' the modulational instability.

Breathers are spatially localized and time periodic solutions of extended Hamiltonian dynamical systems. In this paper we study excitation thresholds for (nonlinearly dynamically stable) ground state breather or standing wave solutions for networks of coupled nonlinear oscillators and wave equations of nonlinear Schrödinger (NLS) type. Excitation thresholds are rigorously characterized by variational methods. The excitation threshold is related to the optimal (best) constant in a class of discr ete interpolation inequalities related to the Hamiltonian energy. We establish a precise connection among d , the dimensionality of the lattice, 2σ+1 , the degree of the nonlinearity and the existence of an excitation threshold for discrete nonlinear Schrödinger systems (DNLS). We prove that if σ≥2/d , then ground state standing waves exist if and only if the total power is larger than some strictly positive threshold, ν thresh (σ,d) . This proves a conjecture of Flach, Kaldko& MacKay in the context of DNLS. We also discuss upper and lower bounds for excitation thresholds for ground states of coupled systems of NLS equations, which arise in the modeling of pulse propagation in coupled arrays of optical fibers.

We study a one-dimensional reaction-diffusion system which describes an isothermal autocatalytic chemical reaction involving both a quadratic (A + B -> 2B) and a cubic (A + 2B -> 3B) autocatalysis. The parameters of this system are the ratio D = D_B/D_A of the diffusion constants of the reactant A and the autocatalyst B, and the relative activity k of the cubic reaction. First, for all values of D > 0 and k >= 0, we prove the existence of a family of propagating fronts (or travelling waves) describing the advance of the reaction. In particular, in the quadratic case k=0, we recover the results of Billingham and Needham [BN]. Then, if D is close to 1 and k is sufficiently small, we prove using energy functionals that these propagating fronts are stable against small perturbations in exponentially weighted Sobolev spaces. This extends to our system part of the stability results which are known for the scalar Fisher equation.

We prove the existence and we study the stability of the kink-like fixed points in a simple Coupled Map Lattice for which the local dynamics has two stable fixed points. The condition for the existence allows us to define a critical value of the coupling parameter where a (multi) generalized saddle-node bifurcation occurs and destroys these solutions. An extension of the results to other CML's in the same class is also displayed. Finally, we emphasize the property of spatial chaos for small coupling.

We consider the existence and stability of the hole, or dark soliton, solution to a Ginzburg-Landau perturbation of the defocusing nonlinear Schroedinger equation (NLS), and to the nearly real complex Ginzburg-Landau equation (CGL). By using dynamical systems techniques, it is shown that the dark soliton can persist as either a regular perturbation or a singular perturbation of that which exists for the NLS. When considering the stability of the soliton, a major difficulty which must be overcome is that eigenvalues may bifurcate out of the continuous spectrum, i.e., an edge bifurcation may occur. Since the continuous spectrum for the NLS covers the imaginary axis, and since for the CGL it touches the origin, such a bifurcation may lead to an unstable wave. An additional important consideration is that an edge bifurcation can happen even if there are no eigenvalues embedded in the continuous spectrum. Building on and refining ideas first presented in Kapitula and Sandstede (Physica D, 1998) and Kapitula (SIAM J. Math. Anal., 1999), we show that when the wave persists as a regular perturbation, at most three eigenvalues will bifurcate out of the continuous spectrum. Furthermore, we precisely track these bifurcating eigenvalues, and thus are able to give conditions for which the perturbed wave will be stable. For the NLS the results are an improvement and refinement of previous work, while the results for the CGL are new. The techniques presented are very general and are therefore applicable to a much larger class of problems than those considered here.