Phase-conjugate mirror for water waves driven by the Faraday instability

Abstract

The Faraday instability appears on liquid baths submitted to vertical oscillations above a critical value. The pattern of standing ripples at half the vibrating frequency that results from this parametric forcing is usually shaped by the boundary conditions imposed by the enclosing receptacle. Here, we show that the time modulation of the medium involved in the Faraday instability can act as a phase-conjugate mirror––a fact which is hidden in the extensively studied case of the boundary-driven regime. We first demonstrate the complete analogy with the equations governing its optical counterpart. We then use water baths combining shallow and deep areas of arbitrary shapes to spatially localize the Faraday instability. We give experimental evidence of the ability of the Faraday instability to generate counterpropagating phase-conjugated waves for any propagating signal wave. The canonical geometries of a point and plane source are implemented. We also verify that Faraday-based phase-conjugate mirrors hold the genuine property of being shape independent. These results show that a periodic modulation of the effective gravity can perform time-reversal operations on monochromatic propagating water waves, with a remarkable efficiency compared with wave manipulation in other fields of physics.