Aeroacoustic catastrophes: upstream cusp beaming in Lilley's equation

The downstream propagation of high-frequency acoustic waves from a point source in a subsonic jet obeying Lilley's equation is well known to be organized around the so-called 'cone of silence', a fold catastrophe across which the amplitude may be modelled uniformly using Airy functions. Here we show that acoustic waves not only unexpectedly propagate upstream, but also are organized at constant distance from the point source around a cusp catastrophe with amplitude modelled locally by the Pearcey function. Furthermore, the cone of silence is revealed to be a cross-section of a swallowtail catastrophe. One consequence of these discoveries is that the peak acoustic field upstream is not only structurally stable but also at a similar level to the known downstream field. The fine structure of the upstream cusp is blurred out by distributions of symmetric acoustic sources, but peak upstream acoustic beaming persists when asymmetries are introduced, from either arrays of discrete point sources or perturbed continuum ring source distributions. These results may pose interesting questions for future novel jet-aircraft engine designs where asymmetric source distributions arise.