In the Faraday experiment, localized states exist in situations where the onset of
the instability is subcritical. They were first observed when the liquid was replaced by
a granular medium where localized objects have been called oscillons. In normal fluids, an hysteresis
domain has been found where highly nonlinear propagating solitary states are
observed within the linear stable regime . This
is quite different from the usual Faraday instability and appears when the thickness
of the fluid layer is decreased to the order of the boundary layer size. It is due to the
highly dissipative character of the flow in this experimental setting. However, in the usual Faraday experiment, no localized states are
observed below the linear instability threshold since the bifurcation is generally
supercritical. For such instabilities, the flow evolution below threshold is simple:
once perturbed, the system oscillates but relaxes to its unperturbed base state with a
characteristic damping time. The difference in our experiment is that the droplet acts
as a local wave exciter.