Tuesday, May 3, 2011

Ship in Bottle, Meet Rogue Wave in Tub - ScienceNOW

Ship in Bottle, Meet Rogue Wave in Tub - ScienceNOW: That equation has several weird solutions, including one with the basic properties of a rogue wave. Discovered in 1983, the so-called Peregrine solution consists of a single peak that suddenly emerges out of a smoothly varying wave train (a so-called sine wave) by sucking energy out of it, zipping along for a while, and then disappearing back into the sine wave. In October 2010, experimenters produced an optical version of that wave with light.

Now, mathematician Amin Chabchoub and physicist Norbert Hoffmann at the Hamburg University of Technology in Germany and physicist Nail Akhmediev of Australian National University in Canberra have produced a Peregrine rogue wave in a water tank 15 meters long, 1.6 meters wide, and filled to a depth of 1 meter.

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