A mathematical proof for the stability of mKdV breathers is announced. This proof involves the existence of a nonlinear equation satisfied by all breather profiles, and a new Lyapunov functional which controls the dynamics of small perturbations and instability modes. In order to construct such a functional, we work in a subspace of the energy one. However, our proof introduces new ideas in order to attack the corresponding stability problem in the energy space. Some remarks about the sine-Gordon case are also considered.
We are interested in stability results for breather solutions of the 5th, 7th and 9th order mKdV equations. We show that these higher order mKdV breathers are stable in $H^2(\R)$, in the same way as \emph{classical} mKdV breathers. We also show that breather solutions of the 5th, 7th and 9th order mKdV equations satisfy the same stationary fourth order nonlinear elliptic equation as the mKdV breather, independently of the order, 5th, 7th or 9th, considered.
In this paper we study the stability problem for mKdV breathers on the left half-line. We are able to show that leftwards moving breathers, initially located far away from the origin, are strongly stable for the problem posed on the left half-line, when assuming homogeneous boundary conditions. The proof involves a Lyapunov functional which is almost conserved by the mKdV flow once we control some boundary terms which naturally arise.
Breather solutions of the modified Korteweg-de Vries equation are shown to be globally stable in a natural H^2 topology. Our proof introduces a new Lyapunov functional, at the H^2 level, which allows to describe the dynamics of small perturbations, including oscillations induced by the periodicity of the solution, as well as a direct control of the corresponding instability modes. In particular, degenerate directions are controlled using low-regularity conservation laws.
We study the long-time dynamics of complex-valued modified Korteweg-de Vries (mKdV) solitons, which are recognized because they blow-up in finite time. We establish stability properties at the H^1 level of regularity, uniformly away from each blow-up point. These new properties are used to prove that mKdV breathers are H^1 stable, improving our previous result, where we only proved H^2 stability. The main new ingredient of the proof is the use of a Bäcklund transformation which links the behavior of breathers, complex-valued solitons and small real-valued solutions of the mKdV equation. We als…
In this article, we prove that a sum of solitons and breathers of the modified Korteweg-de Vries equation (mKdV) is orbitally stable. The orbital stability is shown in H^2. More precisely, we will show that if a solution of (mKdV) is close enough to a sum of solitons and breathers with distinct velocities at t=0 in the H^2 sense, then it stays close to this sum of solitons and breathers, up to space translations for solitons and space or phase translations for breathers. From this, we deduce the orbital stability of a multi-breather of (mKdV), constructed in [49]. As an application of the orbi…
We consider the modified Korteweg-de Vries equation (mKdV) and prove that given any sum P of solitons and breathers of (mKdV) (with distinct velocities), there exists a solution p of (mKdV) such that p(t) -- P(t) $\rightarrow$ 0 when t $\rightarrow$ +$\infty$, which we call multi-breather. In order to do this, we work at the H^2 level (even if usually solitons are considered at the H^1 level). We will show that this convergence takes place in any H^s space and that this convergence is exponentially fast in time. We also show that the constructed multi-breather is unique in two cases: in the cl…
We present a new variational characterization of breather solutions of any equation of the \emph{focusing} Gardner hierarchy. This hierarchy is characterized by a nonnegative index $n$, and $2n+1$ represents the order of the corresponding PDE member. In this paper, we first show the existence of such breathers, and that they are solutions of the (2n+1)th-order Gardner equation. Then we prove a \emph{variational universality property}, in the sense that all these breather solutions satisfy the \emph{same} fourth order stationary elliptic ODE, regardless the order of the hierarchy member. This f…
Multi-kink solutions of the defocusing, modified Korteweg-de Vries equation (mKdV) found by Grosse are shown to be globally $H^1$-stable. Stability in the one-kink case was previously established by Zhidkov, and Merle-Vega. The proof uses transformations linking the mKdV equation with focusing, Gardner-like equations, where stability and asymptotic stability in the energy space are known. We generalize our results by considering the existence, uniqueness and the dynamics of generalized multi-kinks of defocusing, non-integrable gKdV equations, showing the inelastic character of the 4-kink colli…
We consider multi-breathers of (mKdV). Previously, a smooth multi-breather was constructed, and proved to be unique in two cases: first, if the class of super-polynomial convergence to the profile, and second, under the assumption that all speeds of the breathers involved are positive (without rate of convergence). The goal of this short note is to improve the second result: we show that uniqueness still holds if at most one velocity is negative or zero.
We show that breather solutions of the Gardner equation, a natural generalization of the KdV and mKdV equations, are $H^2(\mathbb{R})$ stable. Through a variational approach, we characterize Gardner breathers as minimizers of a new Lyapunov functional and we study the associated spectral problem, through $(i)$ the analysis of the spectrum of explicit linear systems (\emph{spectral stability}), and $(ii)$ controlling degenerated directions by using low regularity conservation laws.
In this note, we review stability properties in energy spaces of three important nonlinear Schrödinger breathers: Peregrine, Kuznetsov-Ma, and Akhmediev. More precisely, we show that these breathers are unstable according to a standard definition of stability. Suitable Lyapunov functionals are described, as well as their underlying spectral properties. As an immediate consequence of the first variation of these functionals, we also present the corresponding nonlinear ODEs fulfilled by these NLS breathers. The notion of global stability for each breather above mentioned is finally discussed. So…
We prove a full asymptotic stability result for solitary wave solutions of the mKdV equation. We consider small perturbations of solitary waves with polynomial decay at infinity and prove that solutions of the Cauchy problem evolving from such data tend uniformly, on the real line, to another solitary wave as time goes to infinity. We describe precisely the asymptotics of the perturbation behind the solitary wave showing that it satisfies a nonlinearly modified scattering behavior. This latter part of our result relies on a precise study of the asymptotic behavior of small solutions of the mKd…
We consider the Sasa-Satsuma (SS) and Nonlinear Schrödinger (NLS) equations posed along the line, in 1+1 dimensions. Both equations are canonical integrable $U(1)$ models, with solitons, multi-solitons and breather solutions, see Yang for instance. For these two equations, we recognize four distinct localized breather modes: the Sasa-Satsuma for SS, and for NLS the Satsuma-Yajima, Kuznetsov-Ma and Peregrine breathers. Very little is known about the stability of these solutions, mainly because of their complex structure, which does not fit into the classical soliton behavior by Grillakis-Shatah…
The Peregrine breather is widely discussed as a model for rogue waves in deep water. We present here a detailed numerical study of perturbations of the Peregrine breather as a solution to the nonlinear Schrödinger (NLS) equations. We first address the modulational instability of the constant modulus solution to NLS. Then we study numerically localized and nonlocalized perturbations of the Peregrine breather in the linear and fully nonlinear setting. It is shown that the solution is unstable against all considered perturbations.
We establish the nonlinear stability of $N$-soliton solutions of the modified Korteweg-de Vries (mKdV) equation. The $N$-soliton solutions are global solutions of mKdV behaving at (positive and negative) time infinity as sums of $1$-solitons with speeds $0<c_1<\cdots< c_N$.The proof relies on the variational characterization of $N$-solitons. We show that the $N$-solitons realize the local minimum of the $(N+1)$-th mKdV conserved quantity subject to fixed constraints on the $N$ first conserved quantities.To this aim, we construct a functional for which $N$-solitons are critical points, we prove…
We consider a Hamiltonian chain of weakly coupled anharmonic oscillators. It is well known that if the coupling is weak enough then the system admits families of periodic solutions exponentially localized in space (breathers). In this paper we prove asymptotic stability in energy space of such solutions. The proof is based on two steps: first we use canonical perturbation theory to put the system in a suitable normal form in a neighborhood of the breather, second we use dispersion in order to prove asymptotic stability. The main limitation of the result rests in the fact that the nonlinear par…
This paper proposes a new class of arbitrarily high-order conservative numerical schemes for the generalized Korteweg-de Vries (KdV) equation. This approach is based on the scalar auxiliary variable (SAV) method. The equation is reformulated into an equivalent system by introducing a scalar auxiliary variable, and the energy is reformulated into a sum of two quadratic terms. Therefore, the quadratic preserving Runge-Kutta method will preserve all the three invariants (momentum, mass and the reformulated energy) in the discrete time flow (assuming the spatial variable is continuous). With the F…
In this article we prove that 2-soliton solutions of the sine-Gordon equation (SG) are orbitally stable in the natural energy space of the problem. The solutions that we study are the {\it 2-kink, kink-antikink and breather} of SG. In order to prove this result, we will use Bäcklund transformations implemented by the Implicit Function Theorem. These transformations will allow us to reduce the stability of the three solutions to the case of the vacuum solution, in the spirit of previous results by Alejo and the first author, which was done for the case of the scalar modified Korteweg-de Vries e…
In this work, we deal with the initial value problem of the 5th-order Gardner equation in $\mathbb{R}$, presenting the local well-posedness result in $H^2(\mathbb{R})$. As a consequence of the local result, in addition to $H^2$-energy conservation law, we are able to prove the global well-posedness result in $H^2(\mathbb{R})$. Finally, we present a stability result for 5th order Gardner breather solution in the Sobolev space $H^2(\mathbb{R})$.
