Amplitude modulation of hydromagnetic waves and associated rogue waves in magnetoplasmas

Abstract

It is shown that the dynamics of amplitude-modulated compressional dispersive Alfvénic (CDA) waves in a collisional megnetoplasma is governed by a complex Ginzburg-Landau (CGL) equation. The nonlinear dispersion relation for the modulational instability of the CDA waves is derived and investigated numerically. It is found that the growth rate of the modulational instability decreases (increases) with the increase of the normalized electron-ion collision frequency α (the plasma β). The modulational instability criterion for the CGL equation is defined precisely and investigated numerically. The region of the modulational instability becomes narrower with the increase of α and β, indicating that the system dissipates the wave energy by collisions, and a stable CDA wave envelope packet in the form of a hole will be a dominant localized pulse. For a collisionless plasma, i.e., α=0, the CGL equation reduces to the standard nonlinear Schrödinger (NLS) equation. The latter is used to investigate the modulational (in)stability region for the CDA waves in a collisionless magnetoplasma. It is shown that, within unstable regions, a random set of nonlinearly interacting CDA perturbations leads to the formation of CDA rogue waves. In order to demonstrate that the characteristics of the CDA rogue waves are influenced by the plasma β, the relevant numerical analysis of the appropriate nonlinear solution of the NLS equation is presented. The application of our investigation to space and laboratory magnetoplasmas is discussed.