Nonlinear, short-crested and localized waves
amin.chabchoub@sydney.edu.au
Centre for Wind, Waves and Water, School of Civil Engineering, The University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia
Solitons and breathers are known to model stationary and extreme localizations in nonlinear dispersive media. Indeed, a series of laboratory experiments, for instance in water waves, optics and BEC, confirmed the validity of the the uni-directional nonlinear Schrödinger equation (NLSE) to describe the spatio-temporal dynamics of such waves. In this study, we report observations of slanted, and thus, directional localized envelope soliton and breather dynamics in a water wave basin. The water surface displacement has been stereo-reconstructed using a marker-net, deployed at the center of the basin, and two synchronized high-speed cameras. The results are in very good agreement with the hyperbolic 2D+1 NLS predictions and confirm for the first time that short-crested as well as slanted strongly-localized waves can be also described by a simplified nonlinear wave framework.