Acoustic excitation of vortex instabilities

The asymptotic solution of Ford and Llewellyn Smith [J. Fluid Mech. 386, 305 (1999)] which describes the dynamics of a Kelvin vortex disturbed by a single large wavelength acoustic excitation, is shown to be unstable to three-dimensional short-wave nonlinear perturbations. This result might have interesting physical applications such as the destabilization of vortices in geophysics or engineering. (C) 2001 American Institute of Physics.