English

Sheets of Spectral Data of Stokes Waves in Weakly Nonlinear Models

Analysis of PDEs 2026-03-17 v1

Abstract

We study the spectral stability of small-amplitude Stokes waves in a family of weakly nonlinear, unidirectional models of the form ut+Lu+(u2)x=0u_t + L u + (u^2)_x = 0. We introduce a perturbation method to expand the spectral data in wave amplitude near flat-state eigenvalue collisions, with the ratio of the colliding modes as a free parameter. This yields sheets of spectral data whose slices at fixed amplitude give isolas of instability. The same perturbation framework treats both high-frequency and Benjamin--Feir instabilities, extends to discontinuous dispersion relations (including the Akers--Milewski equation), and, for the first time, provides an analytic approximation of the Benjamin--Feir spectrum for this model and a direct comparison of high-frequency and Benjamin--Feir growth rates across the full family of models. Asymptotic predictions are validated against numerical spectra computed by Floquet--Fourier--Hill and quasi-Newton methods.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2603.14090,
  title  = {Sheets of Spectral Data of Stokes Waves in Weakly Nonlinear Models},
  author = {Benjamin Akers and Ryan P. Creedon},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.14090},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

24 pages, 7 figures, 1 table