On the modulation equations and stability of periodic generalized Korteweg-de Vries waves via Bloch decompositions (Q611860)

The authors consider traveling wave solutions of the generalized Korteweg-de Vries (GKdV) equation \[ u_{t}=u_{xxx}+f(u)_{x}, \] where \(u\) is a scalar, \(x, t\in\mathbb{R},\) and \(f\in C^{2}(\mathbb{R})\) is a suitable nonlinearity. If \(f\) is a polynomial of degree three or less then the equation is exactly integrable via the inverse scattering transform. However, there are a variety of applications in which equations of the form arise which are not completely integrable and hence the inverse scattering transform cannot be applied. In this article the stability is studied for equations of KdV type for very general nonlinearities making use only of the integrability of the ordinary differential equation (ODE) governing the traveling wave profiles. This ODE is, after an integration, Hamiltonian regardless of the integrability of the corresponding PDE. The modulational stability is studied by using a direct Bloch wave expansion of the linearized eigenvalue problem. This strategy is in some sense a combination of formal modulation expansions based on Bloch wave decompositions and rigorous analysis based on the Evans function and offers several advantages. One advantage is that Evans function techniques do not extend to multiple dimensions in a straightforward way.