An Evans-function approach to spectral stability of internal solitary waves in stratified fluids

Abstract

Frequently encountered in nature, internal solitary waves in stratified fluids have been investigated experimentally, theoretically, and numerically. Mathematically, these waves are exact solutions of the incompressible 2D Euler equations. Contrasting with a rich existence theory and the development of methods for their computation, their stability analysis has hardly received attention at a rigorous mathematical level.This paper proposes a new approach to the investigation of stability of internal solitary waves in a continuously stratified fluid and carries out the following four steps of this approach: (I) to formulate the eigenvalue problem as an infinite-dimensional spatial-dynamical system, (II) to introduce finite-dimensional truncations of the spatial-dynamics description, (III) to demonstrate that each truncation, of any order, permits a well-defined Evans function, (IV) to prove absence of small zeros of the Evans function in the small-amplitude limit. The latter notably implies the low-frequency spectral stability of small-amplitude waves to arbitrarily high truncation order.