Shock wave shock wave, creating a process of destructive interference. The sonic boom associated with the passage of a supersonic aircraft is a type of sound wave produced by constructive interference. Unlike solitons (another kind of nonlinear wave), the energy and speed of a shock wave alone dissipates relatively quickly with distance. When a shock wave passes through matter, energy is preserved but entropy increases. This change in the matter's properties manifests itself as a decrease in the energy which can be extracted as work, and as a drag force on supersonic objects; shock waves are strongly irreversible processes. Shock waves can
Periodic travelling wave of periodic travelling wave generation are now well established. These include: In all of these cases, a key question is which member of the periodic travelling wave family is selected. For most mathematical systems this remains an open problem. It is common that for some parameter values, the periodic travelling waves arising from a wave generation mechanism are unstable. In such cases the solution usually evolves to spatiotemporal chaos. Thus the solution involves a spatiotemporal transition to chaos via the periodic travelling wave. There are two particular mathematical systems that serve as prototypes for periodic travelling waves, and which have