Band Structure of Periodically Surface-Scattered Water Waves

TL;DR

This paper investigates the band structure of water waves interacting with periodic surface scatterers, revealing unique behaviors such as increasing band gaps with frequency and providing new insights into wave suppression and transmission.

Contribution

It introduces a novel analysis of water wave band gaps, highlighting differences from electronic and photonic systems, and derives equations for wave behavior with flow and finite scatterers.

Findings

Band gaps increase with excitation frequency, unlike in other wave systems.

Higher order Bragg scattering significantly suppresses wave propagation.

Derived relationships for transmission and reflection in finite scatterer systems.

Abstract

Bloch wavefunctions are used to derive dispersion relations for water wave propagation in the presence of an infinite array of periodically arranged surface scatterers. For one dimensional periodicity (stripes), band gaps for wavevectors in the direction of periodicity are found corresponding to multiple Bragg scattering. The dependence of these band gaps as a function of scatterer density, strength, and water depth is analyzed. We find in contrast to band gap behavior in electronic, photonic, and acoustic systems, these gaps can increase with excitation frequency $\omega$. Thus, higher order Bragg scattering can play a dominant role in suppressing wave propagation. Furthermore, in one dimension, an additional constraint (in addition to single scatterer energy and momentum conservation) on the calculation of transmission $T$ and reflection $R$ coefficients of a finite number of scatterers is calculated from the exact dispersion relation of the infinite periodic system. This relationship may be useful in measurements where only phase or amplitude is easily measured. In simple two dimensional periodic geometries, we find no complete band gaps and offer semi-quantitative reasons for why this is so. The role of evanescent modes is discussed, and finally, equations for water wave band structure in the presence of a uniform flow are derived.