From modulational instability to focusing dam breaks in water waves
From modulational instability to focusing dam breaks in water waves
The Benjamin-Feir, or modulational, instability has been regarded as the main mechanism of spontaneous disintegration of broad weakly nonlinear wavepackets in deep water waves. We report water wave experiments with another result. For a range of initial parameters, a nearly rectangular initial wavepacket develops a strongly nonlinear modulation with two …