We present a method to prove nonlinear instability of solitary waves in dispersive models. Two examples are analyzed: we prove the nonlinear long time instability of the KdV solitary wave (with respect to periodic transverse perturbations) under a KP-I flow and the transverse nonlinear instability of solitary waves for the cubic nonlinear Schrödinger equation.
We consider linear instability of solitary waves of several classes of dispersive long wave models. They include generalizations of KDV, BBM, regularized Boussinesq equations, with general dispersive operators and nonlinear terms. We obtain criteria for the existence of exponentially growing solutions to the linearized problem. The novelty is that we dealt with models with nonlocal dispersive terms, for which the spectra problem is out of reach by the Evans function technique. For the proof, we reduce the linearized problem to study a family of nonlocal operators, which are closely related to …
We prove nonlinear modulational instability for both periodic and localized perturbations of periodic traveling waves for several dispersive PDEs, including the KDV type equations (e.g. the Whitham equation, the generalized KDV equation, the Benjamin-Ono equation), the nonlinear Schrödinger equation and the BBM equation. First, the semigroup estimates required for the nonlinear proof are obtained by using the Hamiltonian structures of the linearized PDEs; Second, for KDV type equations the loss of derivative in the nonlinear term is overcome in two complementary cases: (1) for smooth nonlinear…
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…
Ill posed linear and nonlinear initial value problems may be stabilized, that it converted to to well posed initial value problems, by the addition of purely nonscalar linear dispersive terms. This is a stability analog of the Turing instability. This idea applies to systems of quasilinear Schrödinger equations from nonlinear optics.
We present a general result of transverse nonlinear instability of 1-d solitary waves for Hamiltonian PDE's for both periodic or localized transverse perturbations. Our main structural assumption is that the linear part of the 1d model and the transverse perturbation "have the same sign". Our result applies to the generalized KP-I equation, the Nonlinear Schrödinger equation, the generalized Boussinesq system and the Zakharov-Kuznetsov equation and we hope that it may be useful in other contexts.
In this paper, we study the transverse instability of generalized Zakharov-Kuznetsov equation for the line soliton with critical speed. We derive and justify a normal form reduction for a bifurcation problem of the stationary nonlinear KdV equation on the product space R ? T.
The Camassa-Holm-Kadomtsev-Petviashvili-I equation (CH-KP-I) is a two dimensional generalization of the Camassa-Holm equation (CH). In this paper, we prove transverse instability of the line solitary waves under periodic transverse perturbations. The proof is based on the framework of the paper written by Rousset and Tzvetkov. Due to the high nonlinearity, our proof requires necessary modification. Specifically, we first establish the linear instability of the line solitary waves. Then through an approximation procedure, we prove that the linear effect actually dominates the nonlinear behavior…
It is a matter of experience that nonlinear waves in dispersive media, propagating primarily in one direction, may appear periodic in small space and time scales, but their characteristics --- amplitude, phase, wave number, etc. --- slowly vary in large space and time scales. In the 1970's, Whitham developed an asymptotic (WKB) method to study the effects of small "modulations" on nonlinear periodic wave trains. Since then, there has been a great deal of work aiming at rigorously justifying the predictions from Whitham's formal theory. We discuss recent advances in the mathematical understandi…
Working in the context of localized modes in periodic potentials, we consider two systems of the massive Dirac equations in two spatial dimensions. The first system, a generalized massive Thirring model, is derived for the periodic stripe potentials. The second one, a generalized massive Gross--Neveu equation, is derived for the hexagonal potentials. In both cases, we prove analytically that the line solitons suffer from instability with respect to periodic transverse perturbations of large periods. The instability is induced by the spatial translation for the massive Thirring model and by the…
We consider the stability and instability of periodic travling waves for Korteweg-de Vries type equations with fractional dispersion and other nonlinear dispersive equations. We establish that a constrained minimizer for the related variational problem is nonlinearly stable to period preserving perturbations. We also discuss when the associated linearized equation admits exponentially growing solutions. The proof utilizes the variational structure of the equation.
In this paper, we investigate the instability of one-dimensionally stable periodic traveling wave solutions of the generalized Korteweg-de Vries equation to long wavelength transverse perturbations in the generalized Zakharov-Kuznetsov equation in two space dimensions. By deriving appropriate asymptotic expansions of the periodic Evans function, we derive an index which yields sufficient conditions for transverse instabilities to occur. This index is geometric in nature, and applies to any periodic traveling wave profile under some minor smoothness assumptions on the nonlinearity. We also desc…
In this paper we consider the transverse instability for a nonlinear Schrödinger equation with a linear potential on $\mathbb{R} \times \mathbb{T}_L$, where $2πL$ is the period of the torus $\mathbb{T}_L$. Rose and Weinstein showed the existence of a stable standing wave for a nonlinear Schrödinger equation with a linear potential. We regard the standing wave of nonlinear Schrödinger equation on $\mathbb{R}$ as a line standing wave of nonlinear Schrödinger equation on $\mathbb{R} \times \mathbb{T}_L$. We show the stability of line standing waves for all $L>0$.
We consider the quadratic and cubic KP - I and NLS models in $1+2$ dimensions with periodic boundary conditions. We show that the spatially periodic travelling waves (with period $K$) in the form $u(t,x,y)=\vp(x-c t)$ are spectrally and linearly unstable, when the perturbations are taken to be with the same period. This strong instability implies other instabilities considered recently - for example with respect to perturbations with periods $nK, n=2, 3, ...$ or bounded perturbations.
Of concern are traveling wave solutions for the fractional Kadomtsev--Petviashvili (fKP) equation. The existence of periodically modulated solitary wave solutions is proved by dimension breaking bifurcation. Moreover, the line solitary wave solutions and their transverse (in)stability are discussed. Analogous to the classical Kadmomtsev--Petviashvili (KP) equation, the fKP equation comes in two versions: fKP-I and fKP-II. We show that the line solitary waves of fKP-I equation are transversely linearly instable. We also perform numerical experiments to observe the (in)stability dynamics of line…
We prove an abstract instability result for an eigenvalue problem with parameter. We apply this criterion to show the transverse linear instability of solitary waves on various examples from mathematical physics.
We show that solitary waves for the 2D Euler-Korteweg model for capillary fluids display nonlinear instability when subjected to transverse perturbations.
This work intends to prove that strong instabilities may appear for high order geometric optics expansions of weakly stable quasilinear hyperbolic boundary value problems, when the forcing boundary term is perturbed by a small amplitude oscillating function, with a transverse frequency. Since the boundary frequencies lie in the locus where the so-called Lopatinskii determinant is zero, the amplifications on the boundary give rise to a highly coupled system of equations for the profiles. A simplified model for this system is solved in an analytical framework using the Cauchy-Kovalevskaya theore…
We consider a one-dimensional Swift-Hohenberg equation coupled to a conservation law, where both equations contain additional dispersive terms breaking the reflection symmetry $x \mapsto -x$. This system exhibits a Turing instability and we study the dynamics close to the onset of this instability. First, we show that periodic traveling waves bifurcate from a homogeneous ground state. Second, fixing the bifurcation parameter close to the onset of instability, we construct modulating traveling fronts, which capture the process of pattern-formation by modeling the transition from the homogeneous…
We study transverse stability and instability of one-dimensional small-amplitude periodic traveling waves of a generalized Kadomtsev-Petviashvili equation with respect to two-dimensional perturbations, which are either periodic or square-integrable in the direction of the propagation of the underlying one-dimensional wave and periodic in the transverse direction. We obtain transverse instability results in KP-fKdV, KP-ILW, and KP-Whitham equations. Moreover, assuming the spectral stability of one-dimensional wave with respect to one-dimensional square-integrable periodic perturbations, we obta…
We show that periodic traveling waves with sufficiently small amplitudes of the Whitham equation, which incorporates the dispersion relation of surface water waves and the nonlinearity of the shallow water equations,are spectrally unstable to long wavelengths perturbations if the wave number is greater than a critical value, bearing out the Benjamin-Feir instability of Stokes waves; they are spectrally stable to square integrable perturbations otherwise. The proof involves a spectral perturbation of the associated linearized operator with respect to the Floquet exponent and the small amplitude…
In this work, we consider the long-time asymptotics for the Cauchy problem of a fourth-order dispersive nonlinear Schrödinger equation with nonzero boundary conditions at infinity. Firstly, in order to construct the basic Riemann-Hilbert problem associated with nonzero boundary conditions, we analysis direct scattering problem. Then we deform the corresponding matrix Riemann-Hilbert problem to explicitly solving models via using the nonlinear steepest descent method and employing the $g$-function mechanism to eliminate the exponential growths of the jump matrices. Finally, we obtain the asympt…
We consider a fifth-order Kadomtsev-Petviashvili equation which arises as a two-dimensional model in the classical water-wave problem. This equation possesses a family of generalized line solitary waves which decay exponentially to periodic waves at infinity. We prove that these solitary waves are transversely spectrally unstable and that this instability is induced by the transverse instability of the periodic tails. We rely upon a detailed spectral analysis of some suitably chosen linear operators.
In this paper, we investigate the spectral instability of periodic traveling wave solutions of the generalized Korteweg-de Vries equation to long wavelength transverse perturbations in the generalized Kadomtsev-Petviashvili equation. By analyzing high and low frequency limits of the appropriate periodic Evans function, we derive an orientation index which yields sufficient conditions for such an instability to occur. This index is geometric in nature and applies to arbitrary periodic traveling waves with minor smoothness and convexity assumptions on the nonlinearity. Using the integrable struc…
There exists a critical speed of propagation of the line solitons in the Zakharov-Kuznetsov (ZK) equation such that small transversely periodic perturbations are unstable for line solitons with larger-than-critical speeds and orbitally stable for those with smaller-than-critical speeds. The normal form for transverse instability of the line soliton with a nearly critical speed of propagation is derived by means of symplectic projections and near-identity transformations. Justification of this normal form is provided with the energy method. The normal form predicts a transformation of the unsta…
We determine the stability and instability of a sufficiently small and periodic traveling wave to long wavelength perturbations, for a nonlinear dispersive equation which extends a Camassa-Holm equation to include all the dispersion of water waves and the Whitham equation to include nonlinearities of medium amplitude waves. In the absence of the effects of surface tension, the result qualitatively agrees with the Benjamin-Feir instability of a Stokes wave. In the presence of the effects of surface tension, it qualitatively agrees with those from formal asymptotic expansions of the physical pro…
We consider transverse propagation of electromagnetic waves through a two-dimensional composite material containing a periodic rectangular array of circular cylinders. Propagation of waves is described by the Helmholtz equation with the continuity conditions the tangential components of the electric and magnetic fields on the boundaries of the cylinders. We assume that the dimensionless wave frequency $ν\ll 1$ that allows us to view the governing equation as a perturbation of the Laplace equation. We show that the eigenfunctions and the eigenvalues are even analytic functions of the magnitude …