COUNTERPROPAGATING QUASI-LINEAR WAVE-PACKETS IN BINARY-FLUID CONVECTION

I report observations of a new state of traveling-wave convection which consists of pairs of localized wave packets which propagate around an annular cell in opposite directions. During their periodic collisions, the wave packets experience a loss in amplitude due to nonlinear interaction which exactly compensates the linear gain they experience at other times. This leads to a regular, small-amplitude state with high phase and group velocities. This state offers the promise of being quantitatively explainable on first principles using the simplest model of coupled complex Ginzburg-Landau equations.