8,892 research outputs found
A dimension-breaking phenomenon for water waves with weak surface tension
It is well known that the water-wave problem with weak surface tension has
small-amplitude line solitary-wave solutions which to leading order are
described by the nonlinear Schr\"odinger equation. The present paper contains
an existence theory for three-dimensional periodically modulated solitary-wave
solutions which have a solitary-wave profile in the direction of propagation
and are periodic in the transverse direction; they emanate from the line
solitary waves in a dimension-breaking bifurcation. In addition, it is shown
that the line solitary waves are linearly unstable to long-wavelength
transverse perturbations. The key to these results is a formulation of the
water wave problem as an evolutionary system in which the transverse horizontal
variable plays the role of time, a careful study of the purely imaginary
spectrum of the operator obtained by linearising the evolutionary system at a
line solitary wave, and an application of an infinite-dimensional version of
the classical Lyapunov centre theorem.Comment: The final publication is available at Springer via
http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00205-015-0941-
Conformal mapping methods for interfacial dynamics
The article provides a pedagogical review aimed at graduate students in
materials science, physics, and applied mathematics, focusing on recent
developments in the subject. Following a brief summary of concepts from complex
analysis, the article begins with an overview of continuous conformal-map
dynamics. This includes problems of interfacial motion driven by harmonic
fields (such as viscous fingering and void electromigration), bi-harmonic
fields (such as viscous sintering and elastic pore evolution), and
non-harmonic, conformally invariant fields (such as growth by
advection-diffusion and electro-deposition). The second part of the article is
devoted to iterated conformal maps for analogous problems in stochastic
interfacial dynamics (such as diffusion-limited aggregation, dielectric
breakdown, brittle fracture, and advection-diffusion-limited aggregation). The
third part notes that all of these models can be extended to curved surfaces by
an auxilliary conformal mapping from the complex plane, such as stereographic
projection to a sphere. The article concludes with an outlook for further
research.Comment: 37 pages, 12 (mostly color) figure
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