Co-periodic stability of periodic waves in some Hamiltonian PDEs

Abstract

The stability of periodic traveling wave solutions to dispersive PDEs with respect to ‘arbitrary’ perturbations is still widely open. The focus is put here on stability with respect to perturbations of the same period as the wave, for KdV-like systems of one-dimensional Hamiltonian PDEs. Stability criteria are derived and investigated first in a general abstract framework, and then applied to three basic examples that are very closely related, and ubiquitous in mathematical physics, namely, a quasilinear version of the generalized Korteweg–de Vries equation (qKdV), and the Euler–Korteweg system in both Eulerian coordinates (EKE) and in mass Lagrangian coordinates (EKL). Those criteria consist of a necessary condition for spectral stability, and of a sufficient condition for orbital stability. Both are expressed in terms of a single function, the abbreviated action integral along the orbits of waves in the phase plane, which is the counterpart of the solitary waves moment of instability introduced by Boussinesq. Regarding solitary waves, the celebrated Grillakis–Shatah–Strauss stability criteria amount to looking for the sign of the second derivative of the moment of instability with respect to the wave speed. For periodic waves, the most striking results obtained here can be summarized as: an odd value for the difference between N—the size of the PDE system—and the negative signature of the Hessian of the action implies spectral instability, whereas a negative signature of the same Hessian being equal to N implies orbital stability. Since these stability criteria are merely encoded by the negative signature of matrices, they can at least be checked numerically. Various numerical experiments are presented, which clearly discriminate between stable cases and unstable cases for (qKdV), (EKE) and (EKL).