Traveling hairpin-shaped fluid vortices in plane Couette flow

Traveling-wave solutions are discovered in plane Couette flow. They are obtained when the so-called steady hairpin vortex state found recently by Gibson [J. Fluid Mech. 638, 243 (2009)] and Itano and Generalis [Phys. Rev. Lett. 102, 114501 (2009)] is continued to sliding Couette flow geometry between two concentric cylinders by using the radius ratio as a homotopy parameter. It turns out that in the plane Couette flow geometry two traveling waves having the phase velocities with opposite signs are associated with their appearance from the steady hairpin vortex state, where the amplitude of the phase velocities increases gradually from zero as the Reynolds number is increased. The solutions obviously inherit the streaky structure of the hairpin vortex state, but shape preserving flow patterns propagate in the streamwise direction. Other striking features of the solution are asymmetric mean flow profiles and strong quasistreamwise vortices which occupy the vicinity of only the top or bottom moving boundary, depending on the sign of the phase velocity. Furthermore, we find that the pitchfork bifurcation associated with the appearance of the solution becomes imperfect when the flow is perturbed by a Poiseuille flow component.