Triadic resonant instability in confined and unconfined axisymmetric geometries

Abstract

We present an investigation of the resonance conditions of axisymmetric internal wave sub-harmonics in confined and unconfined domains. In both cases, sub-harmonics can be spontaneously generated from a primary wave field if they satisfy at least a resonance condition on their frequencies, of the form $\omega_0 = \pm \omega_1 \pm \omega_2$. We demonstrate that, in an unconfined domain, the sub-harmonics follow three dimensional spatial resonance conditions similar to the ones of Triadic Resonance Instability (TRI) for Cartesian plane waves. In a confined domain, however, the spatial structure of the sub-harmonics is fully determined by the boundary conditions and we observed that these conditions prevail upon the resonance conditions. In both configurations, these findings are supported by experimental data showing good agreement with analytical and numerical derivations.