Transient growth, edge states, and repeller in rotating solid and fluid.

Abstract

For the classical problem of the rotation of a solid, we show a somehow surprising behavior involving large transient growth of perturbation energy that occurs when the moment of inertia associated to the unstable axis approaches the moment of inertia of one of the two stable axes. In that case, small but finite perturbations around this stable axis may induce a total transfer of energy to the unstable axis, leading to relaxation oscillations where the stable and unstable manifolds of the unstable axis play the role of a separatrix, an edge state. For a fluid in solid-body rotation, a similar linear and nonlinear dynamics apply to the transfer of energy between three inertial waves respecting the triadic resonance condition. We show that the existence of large transient energy growth and of relaxation oscillations may be physically interpreted as in the case of a solid by the existence of two quadratic invariants, the energy and the helicity in the case of a rotating fluid. They occur when two waves of the triad have helicities that tend towards each other, when their amplitudes are set such that they have the same energy. We show that this happens when the third wave has a vanishing frequency which corresponds to a nearly horizontal wave vector. An inertial wave, perturbed by a small-amplitude wave with a nearly horizontal wave vector, will then be periodically destroyed, its energy being transferred entirely to the unstable wave, although this perturbation is linearly stable, resulting in relaxation oscillations of wave amplitudes. In the general case we show that the dynamics described for particular triads of inertial waves is valid for a class of triadic interactions of waves in other physical problems, where the physical energy is conserved and is linked to the classical conservation of the so-called pseudomomentum, which singles out the role of waves with vanishing frequency.