Paper detail

Numerical study of the transverse stability of NLS soliton solutions in several classes of NLS type equations

Dispersive PDEs are important both in applications (wave phenomena e.g. in hy- drodynamics, nonlinear optics, plasma physics, Bose-Einstein condensates,...) and a mathematically very challenging class of partial differential equations, especially in the time dependent case. An important point with respect to applications is the stability of exact solutions like solitons. Whereas the linear or spectral stability can be addressed analytically in some situations, the proof of full nonlinear (in-)stability remains mostly an open question. In this paper, we numerically investi- gate the transverse (in-)stability of the solitonic solution to the one-dimensional cubic NLS equation, the well known isolated soliton, under the time evolution of several higher dimensional models, being admissible as a tranverse perturbation of the 1d cubic NLS. One of the recent work in this context [42] allowed to prove the instability of the soliton, under the flow of the classical (elliptic) 2d cubic NLS equation, for both localized or periodic perturbations. The characteristics of this instability stay however unknown. Is there a blow-up, dispersion..? We first illustrate how this instability occurs for the elliptic 2d cubic NLS equation and then show that the elliptic-elliptic Davey Stewartson system (a (2+1)-dimensional generalization of the cubic NLS equation) behaves as the former in this context. Then we investigate hyperbolic variants of the above models, for which no theory in this context is available. Namely we consider the hyperbolic 2d cubic NLS equation and the Davey-Stewartson II equations. For localized perturbations, the isolated soliton appears to be unstable for the former case, but seems to be orbitally stable for the latter. For periodic perturbations the soliton is found to be unstable for all transversally perturbed models considered.