Transverse instability of Stokes waves at finite depth (Q6846751)

The manuscript presents a rigorous spectral instability analysis for small-amplitude Stokes waves in finite-depth water. It addresses the long-standing question, going back to the numerical work of McLean and collaborators, of whether two-dimensional travelling periodic gravity waves are unstable under genuinely transverse perturbations when the longitudinal period is fixed, and it situates the problem within the mathematical theory of the full irrotational gravity water-wave equations and the broader study of instability mechanisms for periodic travelling waves.\N\NThe authors work with the full finite-depth free-boundary problem in Zakharov-Craig-Sulem variables, linearise about a small Stokes wave, and introduce Alinhac's good unknown to obtain a more tractable linear system. A substantial part of the analysis is devoted to flattening the free boundary by a conformal map and to establishing analyticity properties for the transformed three-dimensional Dirichlet-Neumann operator with respect to both the Stokes-wave amplitude and the transverse wave-number parameter. They then identify the first relevant resonance on the imaginary axis for the unperturbed operator, employ a Kato similarity transformation and perturbed basis to reduce the decisive spectral information to a \(2\times 2\) Hamiltonian matrix, and carry out third-order expansions in the amplitude and the detuning parameter near the resonant transverse wave number. The exposition is careful and well organised, with the structure of the argument made transparent from the introduction onward, although the technical core is inevitably elaborate because the finite-depth expressions are markedly more involved than in the infinite-depth case.\N\NThe principal finding is a rigorous proof that, for every finite depth except at most finitely many exceptional values, the spectrum of the linearised operator about a sufficiently small Stokes wave contains a pair of eigenvalues with non-zero real parts bifurcating from a resonant imaginary double eigenvalue. More precisely, after an appropriate relation between the detuning parameter and the wave amplitude is imposed, the unstable eigenvalue has real part of order \(\varepsilon^{3}\), thereby establishing transverse spectral instability for purely transverse perturbations in the finite-depth regime. The paper also derives an asymptotic description of the corresponding unstable spectrum as an ellipse, or isola, in the spectral plane, centred near the imaginary axis with centre drifting at order \(\varepsilon^{2}\) and semiaxes of order \(\varepsilon^{3}\). An additional strength is the analysis of the coefficient governing the discriminant, which yields the statement that only finitely many depths can be exceptional; this is a sharper conclusion than one often encounters in related instability problems. The comparison with numerical computations further supports the asymptotic description and links the present theorem convincingly to the earlier numerical literature and to the authors' infinite-depth predecessor.\N\NIn closing, the study's significance lies in extending to finite depth a rigorous transverse-instability theory for Stokes waves in the full water-wave system, thereby closing an important gap between classical numerical evidence and mathematical proof. The paper combines subtle operator-theoretic reduction, precise perturbative analysis, and careful treatment of the finite-depth Dirichlet-Neumann operator in a way that should make it a valuable reference for future work on three-dimensional water-wave instabilities and related Hamiltonian free-boundary problems. It will be of interest to researchers in water waves, nonlinear dispersive partial differential equations, spectral stability, and applied analysis.