For a temporally unstable base flow, the relevant saddle growth rate along a ray distinguishes two cases in the chosen observation frame:
A convective hydrodynamic instability amplifies a travelling wave packet but lets a localized disturbance decay at any fixed point. An absolute hydrodynamic instability grows at a fixed point. The separating case is marginal in exponential rate and can have an algebraic prefactor. In a frame moving with , replace by : this distinction depends on the observation frame.
The dispersion relation gives the zero-group velocity saddle
Thus the absolute growth rate is . More generally the saddle growth rate along a ray is
so a frame travelling at sees the maximal rate .
For , the three open regions are
The line is the temporal marginal boundary; the parabola is the convective-to-absolute boundary. The Green function of the linear complex Ginzburg-Landau equation has the prefactor , so zero exponential rate on the latter boundary still allows algebraic decay of the impulse response. This is the stability diagram of the linear complex Ginzburg-Landau equation.
Figure 1.
Temporal, convective and absolute stability regions for the linear complex Ginzburg-Landau equation with c_d=1
. Details.