NONLINEAR-WAVES - DYNAMICS AND TRANSPORT

Interfacial waves illustrate a wide variety of nonlinear effects including: multiple stationary states; bifurcations affected by symmetry; low-dimensional chaotic dynamics; patterns with long range order; and secondary instabilities leading to spatiotemporal chaos. Theoretical descriptions based on amplitude equations have been quite successful in describing many of these phenomena. Recent experiments on the transport and mixing properties of capillary waves show that particle trajectories can follow Brownian statistics, while concentration fields acquire fractal structure.