Triggered Fronts in the Complex Ginzburg Landau Equation

TL;DR

This paper investigates pattern formation triggered by moving inhomogeneities in the complex Ginzburg-Landau equation, revealing heteroclinic profiles, wavetrain selection, and bifurcation structures with analytical and numerical insights.

Contribution

It provides a detailed bifurcation analysis of triggered fronts in the complex Ginzburg-Landau equation, including existence, wavenumber selection, and geometric methods.

Findings

Existence of heteroclinic profiles near critical trigger speeds

Analytical expansions for wavetrain wavenumbers

Numerical validation showing good agreement with theory

Abstract

We study patterns that arise in the wake of an externally triggered, spatially propagating instability in the complex Ginzburg-Landau equation. We model the trigger by a spatial inhomogeneity moving with constant speed. In the comoving frame, the trivial state is unstable to the left of the trigger and stable to the right. At the trigger location, spatio-temporally periodic wavetrains nucleate. Our results show existence of coherent, "heteroclinic" profiles when the speed of the trigger is slightly below the speed of a free front in the unstable medium. Our results also give expansions for the wavenumber of wavetrains selected by these coherent fronts. A numerical comparison yields very good agreement with observations, even for moderate trigger speeds. Technically, our results provide a heteroclinic bifurcation study involving an equilibrium with an algebraically double pair of complex eigenvalues. We use geometric desingularization and invariant foliations to describe the unfolding. Leading order terms are determined by a condition of oscillations in a projectivized flow, which can be found by intersecting absolute spectra with the imaginary axis.