Modulational instability and pattern formation in discrete dissipative systems

Abstract

We report in this paper the study of modulated wave trains in the one-dimensional (1D) discrete Ginzburg-Landau model. The full linear stability analysis of the nonlinear plane wave solutions is performed by considering both the wave vector (q) of the basic states and the wave vector (Q) of the perturbations as free parameters. In particular, it is shown that a threshold exists for the amplitude and above this threshold, the induced modulational instability leads to the formation of ordered and disordered patterns. The theoretical findings have been numerically tested through direct simulations and have been found to be in agreement with the theoretical prediction. We show numerically that modulational instability is also an indicator of the presence of discrete solitons as were early predicted to exist in Ginzburg-Landau lattices.