Amplification of wave groups in the forced nonlinear Schrödinger equation

Abstract: In many physical contexts, notably including deep water waves, modulation instability in one space dimension is often studied using the nonlinear Schr\"odinger equation. The principal solutions of interest are solitons and breathers which are adopted as models of wave packets. The Peregrine breather in particular is often invoked as a model of a rogue wave. In this paper we add a linear growth term to the nonlinear Schr\"odinger equation to model the amplification of propagating wave groups. This is motivated by an application to wind-generated water waves, but this forced nonlinear Schr\"odinger equation has potentially much wider applicability. We describe a series of numerical simulations which in the absence of the forcing term would generate solitons and/or breathers. We find that overall the effect of the forcing term is to favour the generation of solitons with amplitudes growing at twice the linear growth rate over the generation of breathers.