Gravity waves on modulated flows downstream from an obstacle: The transcritical case

International audiencePeriodic spatial modulations arise in analogue gravity experiments aimed at detecting the analogue version of the Hawking effect in a white-hole flow. Having the same spatial periodicity as low-frequency dispersive modes, they can induce resonances which significantly modify the scattering coefficients. This has been shown numerically in a previous work [X. Busch et al., Phys. Rev. D 90, 105005 (2014)PRVDAQ1550-799810.1103/PhysRevD.90.105005], but the precise dependence of the low-frequency effective temperature on the amplitude and length of the undulation remains elusive. In this article, using the Korteweg–de Vries equation, we explicitly compute this dependence in the small-amplitude limit and find three regimes of “short,” “intermediate” and “long” undulations showing different scaling laws. In the latter, the effective temperature is completely determined by the properties of the undulation, independently of the surface gravity of the analogue white-hole flow. These results are extended to a more realistic hydrodynamical model in an Appendix C