The paper “Effect of real-world perturbations on wave breaking due to a sharp-crested superharmonic instability“, co-authored by Ayoub Mansar, Matt Turner, Tom Bridges, and Frederic Dias, has been accepted for publication in the journal Water Waves (link to final-form manuscript here). Ayoub is a PhD student, and Frederic a Professor at Ecole Normale Superieure de Paris-Saclay. The theory shows that unstable eigenfunctions, associated with the superharmonic instability of large-amplitude Stokes waves, provide initial conditions for deep water wave breaking. Moreover, this mechanism for wave breaking is robust against real-world perturbations (dissipation, surface tension, numerical error, density and depth and speed fluctuations). The picture below (Figure 12 from the paper) shows an example with (a) the breaking wave profile, (b) the eigenfunction at breaking, and (c) the same eigenfunction as (b) but scaled to allow for a direct qualitative comparison of the instability signal shape. Both (b) and (c) correspond to the time step at which breaking is detected through a local vertical interface on the front face of the Stokes wave (breaking onset).