Shallow water analogue of the standing accretion shock instability: experimental demonstration and a two-dimensional model.

Despite the sphericity of the collapsing stellar core, the birth conditions of neutron stars can be highly nonspherical due to a hydrodynamical instability of the shocked accretion flow. Here we report the first laboratory experiment of a shallow water analogue, based on the physics of hydraulic jumps. Both the experiment and its shallow water modeling demonstrate a robust linear instability and nonlinear properties of symmetry breaking, in a system which is one million times smaller and about one hundred times slower than its astrophysical analogue.