No Arabic abstract
Since its elaboration by Whitham, almost fifty years ago, modulation theory has been known to be closely related to the stability of periodic traveling waves. However, it is only recently that this relationship has been elucidated, and that fully nonlinear results have been obtained. These only concern dissipative systems though: reaction-diffusion systems were first considered by Doelman, Sandstede, Scheel, and Schneider [Mem. Amer. Math. Soc. 2009], and viscous systems of conservation laws have been addressed by Johnson, Noble, Rodrigues, and Zumbrun [preprint 2012]. Here, only nondissipative models are considered, and a most basic question is investigated, namely the expected link between the hyperbolicity of modulated equations and the spectral stability of periodic traveling waves to sideband perturbations. This is done first in an abstract Hamiltonian framework, which encompasses a number of dispersive models, in particular the well-known (generalized) Korteweg--de Vries equation, and the less known Euler--Korteweg system, in both Eulerian coordinates and Lagrangian coordinates. The latter is itself an abstract framework for several models arising in water waves theory, superfluidity, and quantum hydrodynamics. As regards its application to compressible capillary fluids, attention is paid here to untangle the interplay between traveling waves/modulation equations in Eulerian coordinates and those in Lagrangian coordinates. In the most general setting, it is proved that the hyperbolicity of modulated equations is indeed necessary for the spectral stability of periodic traveling waves. This extends earlier results by Serre [Comm. Partial Differential Equations 2005], Oh and Zumbrun [Arch. Ration. Mech. Anal. 2003], and Johnson, Zumbrun and Bronski [Phys. D 2010]. In addition, reduced necessary conditions are obtained in the small amplitude limit. Then numerical investigations are carried out for the modulated equations of the Euler--Korteweg system with two types of pressure laws, namely the quadratic law of shallow water equations, and the nonmonotone van der Waals pressure law. Both the evolutionarity and the hyperbolicity of the modulated equations are tested, and regions of modulational instability are thus exhibited.
Partial differential equations endowed with a Hamiltonian structure, like the Korteweg--de Vries equation and many other more or less classical models, are known to admit rich families of periodic travelling waves. The stability theory for these waves is still in its infancy though. The issue has been tackled by various means. Of course, it is always possible to address stability from the spectral point of view. However, the link with nonlinear stability -in fact, emph{orbital} stability, since we are dealing with space-invariant problems-, is far from being straightforward when the best spectral stability we can expect is a emph{neutral} one. Indeed, because of the Hamiltonian structure, the spectrum of the linearized equations cannot be bounded away from the imaginary axis, even if we manage to deal with the point zero, which is always present because of space invariance. Some other means make a crucial use of the underlying structure. This is clearly the case for the variational approach, which basically uses the Hamiltonian -or more precisely, a constrained functional associated with the Hamiltonian and with other conserved quantities- as a Lyapunov function. When it works, it is very powerful, since it gives a straight path to orbital stability. An alternative is the modulational approach, following the ideas developed by Whitham almost fifty years ago. The main purpose here is to point out a few results, for KdV-like equations and systems, that make the connection between these three approaches: spectral, variational, and modulational.
Stability criteria have been derived and investigated in the last decades for many kinds of periodic traveling wave solutions to Hamiltonian PDEs. They turned out to depend in a crucial way on the negative signature of the Hessian matrix of action integrals associated with those waves. In a previous paper (Nonlinearity 2016), the authors addressed the characterization of stability of periodic waves for a rather large class of Hamiltonian partial differential equations that includes quasilinear generalizations of the Korteweg--de Vries equation and dispersive perturbations of the Euler equations for compressible fluids, either in Lagrangian or in Eulerian coordinates. They derived a sufficient condition for orbital stability with respect to co-periodic perturbations, and a necessary condition for spectral stability, both in terms of the negative signature - or Morse index - of the Hessian matrix of the action integral. Here the asymptotic behavior of this matrix is investigated in two asymptotic regimes, namely for small amplitude waves and for waves approaching a solitary wave as their wavelength goes to infinity. The special structure of the matrices involved in the expansions makes possible to actually compute the negative signature of the action Hessian both in the harmonic limit and in the soliton limit. As a consequence, it is found that nondegenerate small amplitude waves are orbitally stable with respect to co-periodic perturbations in this framework. For waves of long wavelength, the negative signature of the action Hessian is found to be exactly governed by the second derivative with respect to the wave speed of the Boussinesq momentum associated with the limiting solitary wave.
We study the phenomenon of revivals for the linear Schrodinger and Airy equations over a finite interval, by considering several types of non-periodic boundary conditions. In contrast with the case of the linear Schrodinger equation examined recently (which we develop further), we prove that, remarkably, the Airy equation does not generally exhibit revivals even for boundary conditions very close to periodic. We also describe a new, weaker form of revival phenomena, present in the case of certain Robin-type boundary conditions for the linear Schrodinger equation. In this weak revival, the dichotomy between the behaviour of the solution at rational and irrational times persists, but in contrast with the classical periodic case, the solution is not given by a finite superposition of copies of the initial condition.
M. Kruskal showed that each nearly-periodic dynamical system admits a formal $U(1)$ symmetry, generated by the so-called roto-rate. We prove that such systems also admit nearly-invariant manifolds of each order, near which rapid oscillations are suppressed. We study the nonlinear normal stability of these slow manifolds for nearly-periodic Hamiltonian systems on barely symplectic manifolds -- manifolds equipped with closed, non-degenerate $2$-forms that may be degenerate to leading order. In particular, we establish a sufficient condition for long-term normal stability based on second derivatives of the well-known adiabatic invariant. We use these results to investigate the problem of embedding guiding center dynamics of a magnetized charged particle as a slow manifold in a nearly-periodic system. We prove that one previous embedding, and two new embeddings enjoy long-term normal stability, and thereby strengthen the theoretical justification for these models.
Complete Hamiltonian formalism is suggested for inertial waves in rotating incompressible fluid. Resonance three-wave interaction processes -- decay instability and confluence of two waves -- are shown to play a key role in the weakly nonlinear dynamics and statistics of inertial waves in the rapid rotation case. Future applications of the Hamiltonian approach in inertial wave theory are investigated and discussed.