  We study a liquid jet that breaks up into drops in an external co-flowing
liquid inside a confining microfluidic geometry. The jet breakup can occur
right after the nozzle in a phenomenon named dripping or through the generation
of a liquid jet that breaks up a long distance from the nozzle, which is called
jetting. Traditionally, these two regimes have been considered to reflect the
existence of two kinds of spatiotemporal instabilities of a fluid jet, the
dripping regime corresponding to an absolutely unstable jet and the jetting
regime to a convectively unstable jet. Here, we present quantitative
measurements of the dripping and jetting regimes, both in an unforced and a
forced state, and compare these measurements with recent theoretical studies of
spatiotemporal instability of a confined liquid jet in a co-flowing liquid. In
the unforced state, the frequency of oscillation and breakup of the liquid jet
is measured and compared to the theoretical predictions. The dominant frequency
of the jet oscillations as a function of the inner flow rate agrees
qualitatively with the theoretical predictions in the jetting regime but not in
the dripping regime. In the forced state, achieved with periodic laser heating,
the dripping regime is found to be insensitive to the perturbation and the
frequency of drop formation remains unaltered. The jetting regime, on the
contrary, amplifies the externally imposed frequency, which translates in the
formation of drops at the frequency imposed by the external forcing. In
conclusion, the dripping and jetting regimes are found to exhibit the main
features of absolutely and convectively unstable flows respectively, but the
frequency selection in the dripping regime is not ruled by the absolute
frequency predicted by the stability analysis.
