15 December 2025 - Zeeman Building, University of Warwick
The inaugural Warwick Waves Workshop (W^3) will take place on Monday 15 December 2025. It is taking place under the remit of the MIR@W - Mathematical Interdisciplinary Research at Warwick scheme. We are also grateful to the London Mathematical Society for supporting the event through a Celebrating New Appointment grants.
The event is intended to be very broad, bringing together people from disconnected disciplines who work on problems related to waves undergoing non-linear phenomena or interacting with structure. The intention is to initiate cross-discipline discussions.
All talks will be held in B3.02 in the Zeeman Building. Coffee breaks and lunch will be in the common room. A schedule of talks is given below.
Registration
Registration is now open online. Attendance is free, but all attendees are asked to register to help organisers plan catering.
Travel information
The meeting will take place in the Zeeman Building at the University of Warwick. The suggested means of travel is to take the train to Coventry and then take a bus to the campus (the 12X being the fastest option). Note that, confusingly, Warwick train station is somewhat further away.
Programme
--- 10:30-11:00 Coffee & Arrivals [Common room] ---
11:00-11:30 Karima Khusnutdinova (Loughborough University) [B3.02]
Long nonlinear ring waves and their relatives
In this talk, I will give a brief overview of recent developments in our studies of long nonlinear ring waves, together with related advances on perturbed line solitons and on hybrid waves that consist, to leading order, of an arc of a ring wave connected to two tangent plane waves. For waves propagating in a stratified fluid over a parallel shear flow, we establish a linear modal decomposition (separation of variables) in the far-field set of the Euler equations with boundary conditions relevant to oceanographic applications. This decomposition is more intricate than the classical one for plane waves. The resulting modal equations form a new spectral problem and require the construction of a singular solution of a nonlinear first-order ODE that governs directional adjustments of the wave speed for the description of ring waves. Depending on whether the coefficients of the amplitude equation are evaluated using the general or the singular solution of this ODE, two distinct evolution equations arise. The validity ranges of these models are assessed through direct numerical simulations of the two-dimensional Boussinesq–Peregrine system for surface waves. Analytical results for perturbed line solitons are obtained by mapping the problem to the KdV equation while retaining the polar-angle dependence in the initial conditions. We also confirm the instability of inward-propagating waves predicted by Ostrovsky and Shrira (1978) and provide insight into the nonlinear development of this instability. Finally, a case study shows that the extended cKdV model offers a significantly more accurate description of surface ring waves and substantially extends the range of validity of weakly nonlinear modelling to waves of moderate amplitude.
11:30-12:00 Hong Duong (University of Birmingham) [B3.02]
Title TBC
Abstract TBC
12:00-12:30 Tobias Grafke (University of Warwick) [B3.02]
Extreme Event Quantification for Rogue Waves in Deep Sea
A central problem in uncertainty quantification is how to characterize the impact that our incomplete knowledge about models has on the predictions we make from them. This question naturally lends itself to a probabilistic formulation, by making the unknown model parameters random with given statistics. Here this approach is used in concert with tools from large deviation theory (LDT) and optimal control to estimate the probability that some observables in a dynamical system go above a large threshold after some time, given the prior statistical information about the system's parameters and its initial conditions. We use this approach to quantify the likelihood of extreme surface elevation events for deep sea waves, so-called rogue waves, described by the nonlinear Schrödinger (NLS) equation, and compare the results to experimental measurements. We show that our approach offers a unified description of rogue wave events in the one-dimensional NLS, covering a vast range of paramters. In particular, this includes both the predominantly linear regime as well as Peregrine-type solitons in the highly nonlinear regime as limiting cases, and is able to predict the experimental data regardless of the strength of the nonlinearity.
--- 12:30-14:00 Lunch break [Common room] ---
14:00-14:30 Yiping Ma (Northumbria University) [B3.02]
Edge solitons in 1D and 2D nonlinear topological insulators
I will first discuss edge solitons in a 2D nonlinear mechanical topological insulator via reduction to a 1D coupled nonlinear Schrödinger equation. A bulk lattice consists of pendulums with cubic nonlinearity connected by linear springs realizing quantum spin Hall effect. On the edge separating two bulk lattices, linear springs are constructed to enable vector edge solitons and domain walls. I will then describe edge solitons in a 1D nonlinear photonic topological insulator via spatial dynamics. The bulk lattice consists of coupled waveguides realizing the Su-Schrieffer-Heeger model with cubic nonlinearity. I will outline some potentially interesting mathematical questions in these and related systems.
14:30-15:00 Martin Reynolds (University of Birmingham) [B3.02]
Title TBC
Abstract TBC
15:00-15:30 Vassos Achilleos (Le Mans University) [B3.02]
Title TBC
Abstract TBC
--- 15:30-16:00 Afternoon tea break [Common room] ---
16:00-16:30 Freddie Jensen (University of Warwick) [B3.02]
A weakly nonlinear model for sound propagation in brass instruments
We present a summary of work on a new weakly nonlinear model of sound in curved 2D or 3D waveguides without mean flow. Modelling begins by considering a general duct geometry, allowing for curvature and width variation, and also in 3D for torsion. Equations are projected onto a Frenet-Serret frame with arclength s, then expanded at each s in terms of the modes of an equiradial straight duct. This is the multi-modal method. We introduce a matricial admittance that encodes the radiative properties of the duct; this allows for the prescription of a radiation condition at the duct outlet. Previous modelling has taken this to be the characteristic admittance: while mathematically tractable, this is highly physically idealised and corresponds to a duct opening into a room of equal radius. We instead derive a radiation condition consisting of a greatly enlarged duct with the original duct at the centre, which tells us more about the passage of sound from the outlet. This allows for more direct physical comparisons with the model, e.g. the end correction for organ pipes or the harmonic series of a trumpet.
16:30-17:00 Bryn Davies (University of Warwick) [B3.02]
Graded metamaterials: rainbow effects for sensing and energy harvesting
Abstract TBC