Experiments in Surface Gravity–Capillary Wave Turbulence

Abstract

The last decade has seen a significant increase in the number of studies devoted to wave turbulence. Many deal with water waves, as modeling of ocean waves has historically motivated the development of weak turbulence theory, which addresses the dynamics of a random ensemble of weakly nonlinear waves in interaction. Recent advances in experiments have shown that this theoretical picture is too idealized to capture experimental observations. While gravity dominates much of the oceanic spectrum, waves observed in the laboratory are in fact gravity–capillary waves, due to the restricted size of wave basins. This richer physics induces many interleaved physical effects far beyond the theoretical framework, notably in the vicinity of the gravity–capillary crossover. These include dissipation, finite–system size effects, and finite nonlinearity effects. Simultaneous space-and-time-resolved techniques, now available, open the way for a much more advanced analysis of these effects.