From modulational instability to focusing dam breaks in water waves

We report water wave experiments performed in a long tank where we consider the evolution of nonlinear deep-water surface gravity waves with the envelope in the form of a large-scale rectangular barrier. Our experiments reveal that, for a range of initial parameters, the nonlinear wave packet is not disintegrated by the Benjamin-Feir instability but exhibits a specific, strongly nonlinear modulation, which propagates from the edges of the wave packet toward the center with finite speed. Using numerical tools of nonlinear spectral analysis of experimental data, we identify the observed envelope wave structures with focusing dispersive dam break flows, a peculiar type of dispersive shock waves recently described in the framework of the semiclassical limit of the 1D focusing nonlinear Schrödinger equation (1D-NLSE). Our experimental results are shown to be in a good quantitative agreement with the predictions of the semiclassical 1D-NLSE theory. This is the first observation of the persisting dispersive shock wave dynamics in a modulationally unstable water wave system.