We experimentally study the nonlinear scattering by local photonic structures embedded in continuous Kerr media and demonstrate nonlinear trapping in guiding structures and resonant transmission in antiguiding structures. An intuitive physical picture is presented and verified in simulations.

Based on the complex Ginzburg-Landau equation (CGLE), a new mapping model of oscillatory media is proposed. The present dynamics is fully determined by an effective phase field renormalized by amplitude. The model exhibits phase turbulence, amplitude turbulence, and a frozen state reported in the CGLE. In addition, we find a state in which the phase and amplitude have spiral structures with opposite rotational directions. This state is found to be observed also in the CGLE. Thus, one concludes that the behaviors observed in the CGLE can be described by only the phase dynamics appropriately constructed.

Variations in sonoluminescence (SL) from an acoustically driven but rapidly translating bubble in solutions of sulfuric acid with alkali-metal salts coincide with variations in translational bubble dynamics. At low acoustic pressures, emission from Ar excited states is observed and the bubble motion is smooth and elliptical. At elevated acoustic pressures, SL intensity decreases, emission from excited alkali-metal atoms is observed, and the bubble motion becomes increasingly erratic with frequent and abrupt changes in direction. These results provide a direct experimental link between single and multibubble SL and point toward the origins of sonochemical reactivity of nonvolatile species.

Recent experimental and theoretical studies on the magnetization dynamics driven by an electric current have uncovered a number of unprecedented rich dynamic phenomena. We predict an intrinsic chaotic dynamics that has not been previously anticipated. We explicitly show that the transition to chaotic dynamics occurs through a series of period doubling bifurcations. In chaotic regime, two dramatically different power spectra, one with a well-defined peak and the other with a broadly distributed noise, are identified and explained.

Small-scale dynamo action has been obtained for a flow previously used to model fluid turbulence, where the sensitivity of the magnetic field parameters to the kinetic energy spectrum can be explored. We apply quantitative morphology diagnostics, based on the Minkowski functionals, to magnetic fields produced by the kinematic small-scale dynamo to show that magnetic structures are predominantly filamentary rather than sheetlike. Our results suggest that the thickness, width, and length of the structures scale differently with magnetic Reynolds number as $R_m^{-2/(1-s)}$ and $R_m^{-0.55}$ for the former two, whereas the latter is independent of $R_m$, with $s$ the slope of the energy spectrum.

The Maxwell-Bloch code COLAX has been upgraded to use detailed hydrodynamical and collisional-radiative simulations of a soft x-ray laser plasma with traveling-wave pumping. The seeding of short pulses of high-order harmonics of the pump laser into the x-ray laser medium has been simulated. The amplification is shown to be a dynamic, two-stage process: the atomic dipoles of the lasing ions are first coherently excited by the short pulse, and subsequently generate a radiation wake which is amplified along its path through the plasma, with consequences on the experimentally recorded spectra.

An approach to the determination of the self-similarity parameter in the problem of converging strong shock waves is suggested. This approach allows one to obtain analytical expressions that approximate the numerical solution. For adiabatic constants $\gamma =6/5–7$, the values of the obtained self-similarity parameter differ by $<1\%$ from the values determined by the numerical procedure. In addition, accurate analytical characteristics of the reflected shock wave are obtained.

We investigate the acoustic normal modes (“phonons”) of a 1D microfluidic droplet crystal at the crossover between 2D flow and confined 1D plug flow. The unusual phonon spectra of the crystal, which arise from long-range hydrodynamic interactions, change anomalously under confinement. The boundaries induce weakening and screening of the interactions, but when approaching the 1D limit we measure a marked increase in the crystal sound velocity, a sign of interaction strengthening. This nonmonotonous behavior of the phonon spectra is explained theoretically by the interplay of screening and plug flow.

The ultrasonic attenuation coefficient, phase velocity, and group velocity spectra are reported for a suspension that supports negative group velocities. The suspension consists of plastic microspheres with an average radius of $80\mu \mathrm{m}$ in an aqueous medium at a volume fraction of 3%. The spectra are measured using a broadband method covering a range from 2 to 20 MHz. The suspension exhibits negative group delays over a band near 4.5 MHz, with the group velocity magnitude exceeding $4.3\times {10}^8\mathrm{m}/\mathrm{s}$ at one point. The causal consistency of these results is confirmed using Kramers-Kronig relations.

We present the first observation of spatiospectral control and localization of supercontinuum light through the nonlinear interaction of spectral components in extended periodic structures. We use an array of optical waveguides in a ${\mathrm{LiNbO}}_3$ crystal and employ the interplay between diffraction and nonlinearity to dynamically control the output spectrum of the supercontinuum radiation. This effect presents an efficient scheme for optically tunable spectral filtering of supercontinua.

We report a novel surface-tension driven instability observed for droplets spreading on a compliant substrate. When a droplet is released on the surface of an agar gel, it forms arms or cracks when the ratio of surface-tension gradient to gel strength is sufficiently large. We explore a range of gel strengths and droplet surface tensions and find that the onset of the instability and the number of arms depend on the ratio of surface tension to gel strength. However, the arm length grows with an apparently universal law $L\propto t^{3/4}$.

A cylindrical wave expansion method is developed to obtain the scattering field for an ideal two-dimensional cylindrical invisibility cloak. A near-ideal model of the invisibility cloak is set up to solve the boundary problem at the inner boundary of the cloak shell. We confirm that a cloak with the ideal material parameters is a perfect invisibility cloak by systematically studying the change of the scattering coefficients from the near-ideal case to the ideal one. However, because of the slow convergence of the zeroth-order scattering coefficients, a tiny perturbation on the cloak would induce a noticeable field scattering and penetration.

Cross correlations of the fluctuating wall-shear stress and the streamwise velocity in the logarithmic region of turbulent boundary layers are reported over 3 orders of magnitude change in Reynolds number. These results are obtained using hot-film and hot-wire anemometry in a wind tunnel facility, and sonic anemometers and a purpose-built wall-shear stress sensor in the near-neutral atmospheric surface layer on the salt flats of Utah’s western desert. The direct measurement of fluctuating wall-shear stress in the atmospheric surface layer has not been available before. Structure inclination angles are inferred from the cross correlation results and are found to be invariant over the large range of Reynolds number. The findings justify the prior use of low Reynolds number experiments for obtaining structure angles for near-wall models in the large-eddy simulation of atmospheric surface layer flows.

Experiments on dewetting thin polymer films confirm the theoretical prediction that thermal noise can strongly influence characteristic time scales of fluid flow and cause coarsening of typical length scales. Comparing the experiments with deterministic simulations, we show that the Navier-Stokes equation has to be extended by a conserved bulk noise term to accomplish the observed spectrum of capillary waves. Because of thermal fluctuations the spectrum changes from an exponential to a power law decay for large wave vectors. Also the time evolution of the typical wave vector of unstable perturbations exhibits noise-induced coarsening that is absent in deterministic hydrodynamic flow.

We report the experimental observation of a well-defined rippling of the air cavity entrained by a rapidly moving solid object entering the free surface of a liquid (water or ethanol). The ripples are fixed in the lab frame, and begin just after the pinch-off (deep seal) of the cavity, simultaneous with the acoustic emission. This acoustic resonance corresponds approximately to the Minnaert frequency for volume oscillations of the bubble. We present an irrotational model which explains the ripples as a spatial rectification of these volume oscillations by the surface of the moving object.

We discuss a novel kind of nonlinear coupler with one channel filled with a negative index metamaterial. The opposite directionality of the phase velocity and the energy flow in the negative index metamaterial channel facilitates an effective feedback mechanism that leads to optical bistability and gap soliton formation.

We derive an expression for the harmonic signal from nonadiabatically aligned molecules that accounts for both electronic and rotational motions. We identify a single approximation, which converts the expression into a physically transparent and computationally convenient form. Our analytical result gives explicitly the time dependence of the harmonic spectra, thus explaining the observations of a class of recent experiments. Moreover, it points to new opportunities for generating insights into the structure and dynamics of molecular systems through harmonic generation experiments from aligned molecules. This includes information regarding the rotational and electronic dynamics of isolated systems, as well as regarding the decoherence and relaxation in molecules subject to a dissipative environment.

We report on experiments of chaotic mixing in a closed vessel, in which a highly viscous fluid is stirred by a moving rod. We analyze quantitatively how the concentration field of a low-diffusivity dye relaxes towards homogeneity, and we observe a slow algebraic decay of the inhomogeneity, at odds with the exponential decay predicted by most previous studies. Visual observations reveal the dominant role of the vessel wall, which strongly influences the concentration field in the entire domain and causes the anomalous scaling. A simplified 1D model supports our experimental results. Quantitative analysis of the concentration pattern leads to scalings for the distributions and the variance of the concentration field consistent with experimental and numerical results.

Motivated by its importance for microfluidic applications, we study the stability of jets formed by pressure-driven concentric biphasic flows in cylindrical capillaries. The specificity of this variant of the classical Rayleigh-Plateau instability is the role of the geometry which imposes confinement and Poiseuille flow profiles. We experimentally evidence a transition between situations where the flow takes the form of a jet and regimes where drops are produced. We describe this as the transition from convective to absolute instability, within a simple linear analysis using lubrication theory for flows at low Reynolds number, and reach remarkable agreement with the data.

In spatially extended Turing-unstable systems, parameter variation should, in theory, produce only fully developed patterns. In experiment, however, localized patterns or solitons sitting on a smooth background often appear. Addition of a nonlocal nonlinearity can resolve this discrepancy by tilting the “snaking” bifurcation diagram characteristic of such problems.