A Trophy of the First World War in the Air: Captain William Wendell Rogers and his Victory over a German Gotha Bomber, 12 December 1917

On 12 December 1917, Captain Wendell Rogers, a Canadian pilot in the Royal Flying Corps, was leading a patrol near Ypres, Belgium when his flight intercepted a group of German bombers. In the ensuing combat Rogers shot down a giant Gotha bomber, the first time such an aircraft had been brought down over continental Europe. A piece of that bomber was recovered and was recently acquired by the Canadian War Museum. The artifact, a fabric Iron Cross salvaged from the wing of the downed Gotha, was donated by Captain Rogers’ son Lloyd. The following article will trace how this object came to reside at the new Canadian War Museum in Ottawa

Two-timing, variational principles and waves

In this paper, it is shown how the author's general theory of slowly varying wave trains may be derived as the first term in a formal perturbation expansion. In its most effective form, the perturbation procedure is applied directly to the governing variational principle and an averaged variational principle is established directly. This novel use of a perturbation method may have value outside the class of wave problems considered here. Various useful manipulations of the average Lagrangian are shown to be similar to the transformations leading to Hamilton's equations in mechanics. The methods developed here for waves may also be used on the older problems of adiabatic invariants in mechanics, and they provide a different treatment; the typical problem of central orbits is included in the examples

Comments on some recent multisoliton solutions

It is shown that some recently proposed multisoliton solutions for the nonlinear Klein-Gordon equations can be reduced to a simple form which can be obtained immediately from the equation

On the excitation of edge waves on beaches

The excitation of standing edge waves of frequency ½ω by a normally incident wave train of frequency ω has been discussed previously (Guza & Davis 1974; Guza & Inman 1975; Guza & Bowen 1976) on the basis of shallow-water theory. Here the problem is formulated in the full water-wave theory without making the shallow-water approximation and solved for beach angles β = π/2N, where N is an integer. The work confirms the shallow-water results in the limit N » 1, shows the effect of larger beach angles and allows a more complete discussion of some aspects of the problem

Sharp bounds on enstrophy growth in the viscous Burgers equation

We use the Cole--Hopf transformation and the Laplace method for the heat equation to justify the numerical results on enstrophy growth in the viscous Burgers equation on the unit circle. We show that the maximum enstrophy achieved in the time evolution is scaled as $\mathcal{E}^{3/2}$, where $\mathcal{E}$ is the large initial enstrophy, whereas the time needed for reaching the maximal enstrophy is scaled as $\mathcal{E}^{-1/2}$. These bounds are sharp for sufficiently smooth initial conditions.Comment: 12 page

Exact shock solution of a coupled system of delay differential equations: a car-following model

In this paper, we present exact shock solutions of a coupled system of delay differential equations, which was introduced as a traffic-flow model called {\it the car-following model}. We use the Hirota method, originally developed in order to solve soliton equations. %While, with a periodic boundary condition, this system has % a traveling-wave solution given by elliptic functions. The relevant delay differential equations have been known to allow exact solutions expressed by elliptic functions with a periodic boundary conditions. In the present work, however, shock solutions are obtained with open boundary, representing the stationary propagation of a traffic jam.Comment: 6 pages, 2 figure

Gradient Catastrophe and Fermi Edge Resonances in Fermi Gas

A smooth spatial disturbance of the Fermi surface in a Fermi gas inevitably becomes sharp. This phenomenon, called {\it the gradient catastrophe}, causes the breakdown of a Fermi sea to disconnected parts with multiple Fermi points. We study how the gradient catastrophe effects probing the Fermi system via a Fermi edge singularity measurement. We show that the gradient catastrophe transforms the single-peaked Fermi-edge singularity of the tunneling (or absorption) spectrum to a set of multiple asymmetric singular resonances. Also we gave a mathematical formulation of FES as a matrix Riemann-Hilbert problem

Nematic dispersive shock waves from nonlocal to local

The structure of optical dispersive shock waves in nematic liquid crystals is investigated as the power of the optical beam is varied, with six regimes identified, which complements previous work pertinent to low power beams only. It is found that the dispersive shock wave structure depends critically on the input beam power. In addition, it is known that nematic dispersive shock waves are resonant and the structure of this resonance is also critically dependent on the beam power. Whitham modulation theory is used to find solutions for the six regimes with the existence intervals for each identified. These dispersive shock wave solutions are compared with full numerical solutions of the nematic equations, and excellent agreement is found

Spatial chaos in weakly dispersive and viscous media: a nonperturbative theory of the driven KdV-Burgers equation

The asymptotic travelling wave solution of the KdV-Burgers equation driven by the long scale periodic driver is constructed. The solution represents a shock-train in which the quasi-periodic sequence of dispersive shocks or soliton chains is interspersed by smoothly varying regions. It is shown that the periodic solution which has the spatial driver period undergoes period doublings as the governing parameter changes. Two types of chaotic behavior are considered. The first type is a weak chaos, where only a small chaotic deviation from the periodic solution occurs. The second type corresponds to the developed chaos where the solution ``ignores'' the driver period and represents a random sequence of uncorrelated shocks. In the case of weak chaos the shock coordinate being repeatedly mapped over the driver period moves on a chaotic attractor, while in the case of developed chaos it moves on a repellor. Both solutions depend on a parameter indicating the reference shock position in the shock-train. The structure of a one dimensional set to which this parameter belongs is investigated. This set contains measure one intervals around the fixed points in the case of periodic or weakly chaotic solutions and it becomes a fractal in the case of strong chaos. The capacity dimension of this set is calculated.Comment: 32 pages, 12 PostScript figures, useses elsart.sty and boxedeps.tex, fig.11 is not included and can be requested from <[email protected]