Rogue waves of the Sasa-Satsuma equation in a chaotic wave field

Abstract

© 2014 American Physical Society. We study the properties of the chaotic wave fields generated in the frame of the Sasa-Satsuma equation (SSE). Modulation instability results in a chaotic pattern of small-scale filaments with a free parameter - the propagation constant k. The average velocity of the filaments is approximately given by the group velocity calculated from the dispersion relation for the plane-wave solution. Remarkably, our results reveal the reason for the skewed profile of the exact SSE rogue-wave solutions, which was one of their distinctive unexplained features. We have also calculated the probability density functions for various values of the propagation constant k, showing that probability of appearance of rogue waves depends on k.