Chaos in nonpropagating hydrodynamic solitons.

Abstract

The time series of the amplitude of hydrodynamic solitons have been measured and investigated in a Faraday experiment. The Lyapunov exponent spectra prove that the soliton waves always evolve with chaotic behavior. The distributions of the exponents over the plane of the driving parameters show that large exponents correspond to small stability of solitary waves. The experimental results also predict that there may exist some chaotic equations in the high order reductions of the fundamental hydrodynamical equations together with the integrable nonlinear Schr\"odinger equation in low order. \textcopyright{} 1996 The American Physical Society.