Dispersive dam-break flow of a photon fluid
Optics
2017-06-28 v2 Pattern Formation and Solitons
Exactly Solvable and Integrable Systems
Fluid Dynamics
Abstract
We investigate the temporal photonic analogue of the dam-break phenomenon for shallow water by exploiting a fiber optics setup. We clearly observe the decay of the step-like input (photonic dam) into a pair of oppositely propagating rarefaction wave and dispersive shock wave. Our results show evidence for a critical transition of the dispersive shock into a self-cavitating state. The detailed observation of the cavitating state dynamics allows for a fully quantitative test of the Whitham modulation theory applied to the universal defocusing nonlinear Schroedinger equation.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1703.09019,
title = {Dispersive dam-break flow of a photon fluid},
author = {Gang Xu and Matteo Conforti and Alexandre Kudlinski and Arnaud Mussot and Stefano Trillo},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1703.09019},
year = {2017}
}