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Instability of the peaked travelling wave in a local model for shallow water waves

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 September 2025

Fabio Natali
Affiliation:
Departamento de Matemática, Universidade Estadual de Maringá, Avenida Colombo, CEP 87020-900, Maringá, PR, Brazil
Dmitry E. Pelinovsky*
Affiliation:
Department of Mathematics and Statistics, McMaster University, Hamilton, ON L8S 4K1, Canada
Shuoyang Wang
Affiliation:
Department of Mathematics and Statistics, McMaster University, Hamilton, ON L8S 4K1, Canada
*
Corresponding author: Dmitry Pelinovsky; Email: pelinod@mcmaster.ca
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Abstract

The travelling wave with the peaked profile is usually considered as a limit in the family of travelling waves with the smooth profiles. We study the linear and nonlinear stability of the peaked travelling wave by using a local model for shallow water waves, which is an extended version of the Hunter–Saxton equation. The evolution problem is well-defined in the function space $H^1_{\rm per} \cap W^{1,\infty}$, where we derive the linearised equations of motion and study the nonlinear evolution of co-periodic perturbations to the peaked periodic wave by using the method of characteristics. Within the linearised equations, we prove the spectral instability of the peaked travelling wave from the spectrum of the linearised operator in a Hilbert space, which completely covers the closed vertical strip with a specific half-width. Within the nonlinear equations, we prove the nonlinear instability of the peaked travelling wave by showing that the gradient of perturbations grows at the wave peak. By using numerical approximations of the smooth travelling waves and the spectrum of their associated linearised operator, we show that the spectral instability of the peaked travelling wave cannot be obtained as a limit in the family of the spectrally stable smooth travelling waves.

Information

Type
Review Article
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BY
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution and reproduction, provided the original article is properly cited.
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2025. Published by Cambridge University Press.
Figure 0

Figure 1. (a) The solid lines represent the smooth profiles η for $c = 1.03, 1.07$. The dashed line represents the peaked profile $\eta_*$ for $c = c_*$. (b) The wave amplitude versus the wave speed c for smooth profiles in $(1,c_*)$ and cusped profiles in $(c_*,c_{\infty})$, where $c_*\approx 1.1107$ (dashed line) and $c_\infty\approx 1.1850$ (dashed-dotted line).

Figure 1

Figure 2. The solution profiles $\hat{\eta}$ in Fourier space (8.5) in log-log coordinates for $c = 1.03,1.07$ with N = 300 grid points and $\epsilon = 10^{-14}$ tolerance. The black dashed line represents the peaked profile $\eta_*$ for $c = c_*$.

Figure 2

Figure 3. Eigenfunctions corresponding to the first four eigenvalues for five values of c in $(1,c_*)$. The grid in physical space is chosen to be N = 300. The solution profiles obtained from equation (8.4) are used, and all eigenfunctions are plotted on $[-\pi,\pi]$ with positive slope near $-\pi$.

Figure 3

Figure 4. The absolute value of eigenfunctions corresponding to the first four eigenvalues in Fourier space is plotted versus $m\in \{1,\dots, N\}$ for five values of c in $(1,c_*)$. The grid in physical space is chosen to be N = 300, and the solution profiles $\hat \eta$ are obtained from equations (8.4) and (8.5).

Figure 4

Figure 5. The dependence of the first four eigenvalues of the spectral problem (8.7) is plotted versus c for $c \in (1,c_*)$ obtained with the finite-difference method (left) and with the Fourier collocation method (right). Eigenvalues computed for the peaked profile with $c = c_*$ in the finite-difference method (left) are marked as circles. The grid in physical space is chosen to be N = 300.

Figure 5

Figure 6. (a) The third eigenvalue $|\lambda_3|$ plotted versus c to show its departure from 0 as $c\to c_*^-$ for different grids $N=100,200,300$ by the finite difference (CD) and Fourier collocations (Fourier) methods. (b) The same plots but for the L2-norm of the residual terms $\Vert \mathcal L\gamma_3 - \lambda_3 \gamma_3 \Vert_{L^2}$ and $\Vert \widehat {\mathcal L} \hat \gamma_3 - \lambda_3 \hat \gamma_3 \Vert_{L^2}$.