The stability theory of periodic traveling waves is much less advanced than for solitary waves, which were first studied by Boussinesq and have received a lot of attention in the last decades. In particular, despite recent breakthroughs regarding periodic waves in reaction-diffusion equations and viscous systems of conservation laws [Johnson-Noble-Rodrigues-Zumbrun, Invent math (2014)], the stability of periodic traveling wave solutions to dispersive PDEs with respect to 'arbitrary' perturbations is still widely open in the absence of a dissipation mechanism. The focus is put here on co-periodic stability of periodic waves, that is, stability with respect to perturbations of the same period as the wave, for KdV-like systems of one-dimensional Hamiltonian PDEs. Fairly general nonlinearities are allowed in these systems, so as to include various models of mathematical physics, and this precludes complete integrability techniques. Stability criteria are derived and investigated first in a general abstract framework, and then applied to three basic examples that are very closely related, and ubiquitous in mathematical physics, namely, a quasilinear version of the generalized Korteweg-de Vries equation (qKdV), and the Euler-Korteweg system in both Eulerian coordinates (EKE) and in mass Lagrangian coordinates (EKL). Those criteria consist of a necessary condition for spectral stability, and of a sufficient condition for orbital stability. Both are expressed in terms of a single function, the abbreviated action integral along the orbits of waves in the phase plane, which is the counterpart of the solitary waves moment of instability introduced by Boussinesq. However, the resulting criteria are more complicated for periodic waves because they have more degrees of freedom than solitary waves, so that the action is a function of N + 2 variables for a system of N PDEs, while the moment of instability is a function of the wave speed only once the endstate of the solitary wave is fixed. Regarding solitary waves, the celebrated Grillakis-Shatah-Strauss stability criteria amount to looking for the sign of the second derivative of the moment of instability with respect to the wave speed. For periodic waves, stability criteria involve all the second order, partial derivatives of the action. This had already been pointed out by various authors for some specific equations, in particular the generalized Korteweg-de Vries equation -which is special case of (qKdV) -but not from a general point of view, up to the authors' knowledge. The most striking results obtained here can be summarized as: an odd value for the difference between N and the negative signature of the Hessian of the action implies spectral instability, whereas a negative signature of the same Hessian being equal to N implies orbital stability. Furthermore, it is shown that, when applied to the Euler-Korteweg system, this approach yields several interesting connexions between (EKE), (EKL), and (qKdV). More precisely, (EKE) and (EKL) share the same abbreviated a...

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 -or Morse index -of the Hessian matrix of action integrals associated with those waves. In a previous paper (published in Nonlinearity in 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 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 M (c), the second derivative with respect to the wave speed of the Boussinesq momentum associated with the limiting solitary wave. This gives an alternate proof of Gardner's result [J. Reine Angew. Math. 1997] according to which the instability of the limiting solitary wave, when M (c) is negative, implies the instability of nearby periodic waves. Interestingly enough, it is found here that in the inverse situation, when M (c) is positive, nearby periodic waves are orbitally stable with respect to co-periodic perturbations.

Motivated by the ongoing study of dispersive shock waves in non integrable systems, we propose and analyze a set of wave parameters for periodic waves of a large class of Hamiltonian partial di erential systems | including the generalized Korteweg{de Vries equations and the Euler{Korteweg systems | that are wellbehaved in both the small amplitude and small wavelength limits. We use this parametrization to determine ne asymptotic properties of the associated modulation systems, including detailed descriptions of eigenmodes. As a consequence, in the solitary wave limit we prove that modulational instability is decided by the sign of the second derivative | with respect to speed, xing the endstate | of the Boussinesq moment of instability; and, in the harmonic limit, we identify an explicit modulational instability index, of Benjamin{Feir type.