Superregular breathers in a complex modified Korteweg-de Vries system.

Abstract

We study superregular (SR) breathers (i.e., the quasi-Akhmediev breather collision with a certain phase shift) in a complex modified Korteweg-de Vries equation. We demonstrate that such SR waves can exhibit intriguing nonlinear structures, including the half-transition and full-suppression modes, which have no analogues in the standard nonlinear Schrödinger equation. In contrast to the standard SR breather formed by pairs of quasi-Akhmediev breathers, the half-transition mode describes a mix of quasi-Akhmediev and quasi-periodic waves, whereas the full-suppression mode shows a non-amplifying nonlinear dynamics of localized small perturbations associated with the vanishing growth rate of modulation instability. Interestingly, we show analytically and numerically that these different SR modes can be evolved from an identical localized small perturbation. In particular, our results demonstrate an excellent compatibility relation between SR modes and the linear stability analysis.