We all hear about Rogue Waves, the monsters that appear out of nowhere to overturn ships in seconds. "One account describes the appearance of a giant wave trough which onlookers likened to a "hole in the sea", followed by a twelve-story-tall "wall of water." To further compound the mystery, some such waves have been said to appear mid-ocean, and often in calm weather."
Using non linear optics and noise as a start point in conducting wave propagation in crystals, scientists think they may know what causes these waves to appear. "...physicists in the US and Germany have managed to produce equivalent optical rogue waves by launching laser pulses into photonic-crystal fibres. Having performed computer simulations of the optical system, the researchers suggest that optical rogue waves, and therefore oceanic rogue waves, are seeded by noise."How is this analogous to the ocean? Just like a photonic-crystal fibre, the ocean is a non-linear medium. It also has a lot of noise, produced, among other things, by the bombardment of wind. “The mathematics that describes optical wave production is extremely similar to that which describes water waves in the deep sea,”
Awesome research, insightful thinking to the max. Ain't science grand?
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