Pattern Formation And Solitons

A new mechanism for spiral vortex nucleation in nongradient reaction diffusion systems is proposed. It involves two key ingredients: An Ising-Bloch type front bifurcation and an instability of a planar front to transverse perturbations. Vortex nucleation by this mechanism plays an important role in inducing a transition from labyrinthine patterns to spiral turbulence. PACS numbers: 05.45.+b, 82.20.Mj

Perturbation approaches developed so far for the dark soliton solutions of the (fully integrable) defocusing nonlinear Schroedinger equation cannot describe the dynamics resulting from dissipative perturbations of the Ginzburg-Landau type. Here spatially slowly decaying changes of the background wavenumber occur which requires the use of matching technics. It is shown how the perturbation selects a 1 or 2-parameter subfamily from the 3-parameter family of dark solitons of the nonlinear Schroedinger equation. The dynamics of the perturbed system can then be described analytically as motion within this selected subfamily yielding interesting scenarios. Interaction with shocks occurring in the complex Ginzburg-Landau equation can be included in a straight forward way.

We discuss the problem of fronts propagating into metastable and unstable states. We examine the time development of the leading edge, discovering a precursor which in the metastable case propagates out ahead of the front at a velocity more than double that of the front and establishes the characteristic exponential behavior of the steady-state leading edge. We also study the dependence of the velocity on the imposition of a cutoff in the reaction term. These studies shed new light on the problem of velocity selection in the case of propagation into an unstable state. We also examine how discreteness in a particle simulation acts as an effective cutoff in this case.

We present calculations of the stability of planar fronts in two mean field models of diffusion limited growth. The steady state solution for the front can exist for a continuous family of velocities, we show that the selected velocity is given by marginal stability theory. We find that naive mean field theory has no instability to transverse perturbations, while a threshold mean field theory has such a Mullins-Sekerka instability. These results place on firm theoretical ground the observed lack of the dendritic morphology in naive mean field theory and its presence in threshold models. The existence of a Mullins-Sekerka instability is related to the behavior of the mean field theories in the zero-undercooling limit.

Localized traveling wave trains or pulses have been observed in various experiments in binary mixture convection. For strongly negative separation ratio, these pulse structures can be described as two interacting fronts of opposite orientation. An analytical study of the front solutions in a real Ginzburg-Landau equation coupled to a mean field is presented here as a first approach to the pulse solution. The additional mean field becomes important when the mass diffusion in the mixture is small as is the case in liquids. Within this framework it can lead to a hysteretic transition between slow and fast fronts when the Rayleigh number is changed.

We discuss the front propagation in ferroelectric chiral smectics (SmC*) subjected to electric and magnetic fields applied parallel to smectic layers. The reversal of the electric field induces the motion of domain walls or fronts that propagate into either an unstable or a metastable state. In both regimes, the front velocity is calculated exactly. Depending on the field, the speed of a front propagating into the unstable state is given either by the so-called linear marginal stability velocity or by the nonlinear marginal stability expression. The cross-over between these two regimes can be tuned by a magnetic field. The influence of initial conditions on the velocity selection problem can also be studied in such experiments. SmC ∗ therefore offers a unique opportunity to study different aspects of front propagation in an experimental system.

We study the interfaces' time evolution in one-dimensional bistable extended dynamical systems with discrete time. The dynamics is governed by the competition between a local piece-wise affine bistable mapping and any couplings given by the convolution with a function of bounded variation. We prove the existence of travelling wave interfaces, namely fronts, and the uniqueness of the corresponding selected velocity and shape. This selected velocity is shown to be the propagating velocity for any interface, to depend continuously on the couplings and to increase with the symmetry parameter of the local nonlinearity. We apply the results to several examples including discrete and continuous couplings, and the planar fronts' dynamics in multi-dimensional Coupled Map Lattices. We eventually emphasize on the extension to other kinds of fronts and to a more general class of bistable extended mappings for which the couplings are allowed to be nonlinear and the local map to be smooth.

An asymptotic method for finding instabilities of arbitrary d -dimensional large-amplitude patterns in a wide class of reaction-diffusion systems is presented. The complete stability analysis of 2- and 3-dimensional localized patterns is carried out. It is shown that in the considered class of systems the criteria for different types of instabilities are universal. The specific nonlinearities enter the criteria only via three numerical constants of order one. The performed analysis explains the self-organization scenarios observed in the recent experiments and numerical simulations of some concrete reaction-diffusion systems.

In this paper we describe invariant geometrical ~structures in the phase space of the Swift-Hohenberg equation in a neighborhood of its periodic stationary states. We show that in spite of the fact that these states are only marginally stable (i.e., the linearized problem about these states has continuous spectrum extending all the way up to zero), there exist finite dimensional invariant manifolds in the phase space of this equation which determine the long-time behavior of solutions near these stationary solutions. In particular, using this point of view, we obtain a new demonstration of Schneider's recent proof that these states are nonlinearly stable.

Linear global modes, which are time-harmonic solutions with vanishing boundary conditions, are analysed in the context of the complex Ginzburg-Landau equation with slowly varying coefficients in doubly infinite domains. The most unstable modes are shown to be characterized by the geometry of their Stokes line network: they are found to generically correspond to a configuration with two turning points issued from opposite sides of the real axis which are either merged or connected by a common Stokes line. A region of local absolute instability is also demonstrated to be a necessary condition for the existence of unstable global modes.