Slow modulations of periodic waves in Hamiltonian PDEs, with application to capillary fluids (Q457111)

This work is motivated by the nonlinear waves analysis of the so-called Euler-Korteweg system, which arises in the modelling of capillary fluids - these comprise liquid-vapor mixtures, super fluids, or even regular fluids at sufficiently small scales. It's known that modulation theory is closely related to the stability of periodic traveling waves. In this paper, the authors consider non dissipative models 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 Korteweg-de Vries equation and the 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, super fluidity 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. 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. The paper is supported by annexes presenting a concrete computation, a convenient structural assumption and Galilean invariance.