We prove that a Stokes' periodic wave of sufficiently small amplitude, traveling under gravity at the free surface of a two dimensional, infinitely deep, and irrotational flow, is spectrally unstable to slow modulation, rigorously justifying Benjamin and Feir's formal argument.
Small-amplitude, traveling, space periodic solutions -- called Stokes waves -- of the 2 dimensional gravity water waves equations in deep water are linearly unstable with respect to long-wave perturbations, as predicted by Benjamin and Feir in 1967. We completely describe the behavior of the four eigenvalues close to zero of the linearized equations at the Stokes wave, as the Floquet exponent is turned on. We prove in particular the conjecture that a pair of non-purely imaginary eigenvalues depicts a closed figure eight, parameterized by the Floquet exponent, in full agreement with numerical s…
Whitham and Benjamin predicted in 1967 that small-amplitude periodic traveling Stokes waves of the 2d-gravity water waves equations are linearly unstable with respect to long-wave perturbations, if the depth $\mathtt h$ is larger than a critical threshold $\mathtt h_{WB} \approx 1.363$. In this paper we completely describe, for any value of $\mathtt h > 0$, the four eigenvalues close to zero of the linearized equations at the Stokes wave, as the Floquet exponent $μ$ is turned on. We prove in particular the existence of a unique depth $\mathtt h_{WB}$, which coincides with the one predicted by …
It is proven that small-amplitude steady periodic water waves with infinite depth are unstable with respect to long-wave perturbations. This modulational instability was first observed more than half a century ago by Benjamin and Feir. It has been proven rigorously only in the case of finite depth. We provide a completely different and self-contained approach to prove the spectral modulational instability for water waves in both the finite and infinite depth cases.
We consider the gravity water waves system with a periodic one-dimensional interface in infinite depth, and prove a rigorous reduction of these equations to Birkhoff normal form up to degree four. This proves a conjecture of Zakharov-Dyachenko [55] suggested by the formal Birkhoff integrability of the water waves Hamiltonian truncated at order four. As a consequence, we also obtain a long-time stability result: periodic perturbations of a flat interface that are of size $\varepsilon$ in a sufficiently smooth Sobolev space lead to solutions that remain regular and small up to times of order $\v…
We generalize the periodic Evans function approach recently used to study the spectral stability of Stokes wave and gravity-capillary (including Wilton ripples) in water of finite depth to study spectral stability of Stokes waves in water of infinite depth. We prove waves of sufficiently small amplitude are always low-frequency unstable regardless of the wave number and gravity, giving an alternative proof for the Benjamin-Feir modulational instability in the infinite depth case. Here, the first proof for the infinite depth case is recently obtained by Nguyen and Strauss. We also study the spe…
Motivated by the ongoing study of dispersive shock waves in non integrable systems, we propose and analyze a set of wave parameters for periodic waves of a large class of Hamiltonian partial differential systems -- including the generalized Korteweg de Vries equations and the Euler-Korteweg systems -- that are well-behaved in both the small amplitude and small wavelength limits. We use this parametrization to determine fine asymptotic properties of the associated modulation systems, including detailed descriptions of eigenmodes. As a consequence, in the solitary wave limit we prove that modula…
We examine the spectral stability and instability of periodic traveling waves for regularized long-wave models. Examples include the regularized Boussinesq, Benney--Luke, and Benjamin--Bona--Mahony equations. Of particular interest is a striking new instability phenomenon -- spectrum off the imaginary axis extending into infinity. The spectrum of the linearized operator of the generalized Korteweg--de Vries equation, for instance, lies along the imaginary axis outside a bounded set. The spectrum for a regularized long-wave model, by contrast, can vary markedly with the parameters of the period…
We consider the gravity water waves system with a periodic one-dimensional interface in infinite depth and we establish the existence and the linear stability of small amplitude, quasi-periodic in time, traveling waves. This provides the first existence result of quasi-periodic water waves solutions bifurcating from a \emph{completely resonant} elliptic fixed point. The proof is based on a Nash-Moser scheme, Birkhoff normal form methods and pseudo-differential calculus techniques. We deal with the combined problems of \emph{small divisors} and the \emph{fully-nonlinear} nature of the equations…
Spectral stability in the modified Camassa-Holm equation
School of Mathematics and Statistics, Henan Normal University(河南师范大学数学与统计学院);School of Mathematics, Southeast University(东南大学数学系);School of Mathematics and Statistics, Huazhong University of Science and Technology(华中科技大学数学与统计学院)
The Alber equation is a phase-averaged second-moment model for the statistics of a sea state, which recently has been attracting renewed attention. We extend it in two ways: firstly, we derive a generalized Alber system starting from a system of nonlinear Schrödinger equations, which contains the classical Alber equation as a special case but can also describe crossing seas, i.e. two wavesystems with different wavenumbers crossing. (These can be two completely independent wavenumbers, i.e. in general different directions and different moduli.) We also derive the associated 2-dimensional scalar…
This paper investigates the stability of traveling wave solutions to the free boundary Euler equations with a submerged point vortex. We prove that sufficiently small-amplitude waves with small enough vortex strength are conditionally orbitally stable. In the process of obtaining this result, we develop a quite general stability/instability theory for bound state solutions of a large class of infinite-dimensional Hamiltonian systems in the presence of symmetry. This is in the spirit of the seminal work of Grillakis, Shatah, and Strauss, but with hypotheses that are relaxed in a number of ways …
Various approaches to studying the stability of solutions of nonlinear PDEs lead to explicit formulae determining the stability or instability of the wave for a wide range of classes of equations. However, these are typically specialized to a particular equation and checking the stability conditions may not be not straightforward. We present results for a large class of problems that reduce the determination of spectral stability of a wave to a simple task of locating zeros of explicitly constructed polynomials. We study spectral stability of small-amplitude periodic waves in scalar Hamiltonia…