Superadiabatic evolution of acoustic and vorticity perturbations in Couette flow

Nonadiabatic transitions between the acoustic and the vorticity modes perturbing a plane Couette flow are examined in the context of higher-order WKB asymptotics. In the case of the Schrödinger equation, it is known that looking at the solution expressed in the superadiabatic base, composed of higher-order asymptotic solutions, smoothes quantum state transitions. Then, increasing the order of the superadiabatic base causes these transitions to tend to the Gauss error function, and, once an optimal order is reached, the asymptotic process starts to diverge. We show that for perturbations in Couette flow, similar results can be applied on the amplitudes of the vorticity and acoustic modes. This allows us to more closely track the emergence of the acoustic modes in the presence of the vorticity mode.