Patrick Sprenger publishes article on dispersive shock waves with non-convex dispersion in SIAM Journal of Applied Math

Patrick Sprenger and Mark Hoefer publish a new paper in SIAM Journal of Applied Mathematics.  The paper, Shock waves in dispersive hydrodynamics with non-convex dispersion, identifies new dispersive shock wave structures admitted by the fifth order Kawahara equation, a universal model for dispersive hydrodynamic systems with higher order dispersion. Such phenomena occur in various physical systems including ultra-shallow water flow, nonlinear fiber optics and spin orbit coupled Bose-Einstein condensates. The shock waves described in this work have been studied numerically in the past but no unifying theory existed to describe these non-classical structures. This work motivates a new shallow water experiment that is currently under development in the lab.