Instability of solitons - revisited, I: the critical generalized KdV equation

Abstract

We revisit the phenomenon of instability of solitons in the generalized Korteweg-de Vries equation, $u_t + \partial_x(u_{xx} + u^p) = 0$. It is known that solitons are unstable for nonlinearities $p \geq 5$, with the critical power $p=5$ being the most challenging case to handle. The critical case was proved by Martel-Merle in [11], where the authors crucially relied on the pointwise decay estimates of the linear KdV flow. In this paper, we show simplified approaches to obtain the instability of solitons via truncation and monotonicity, which can be also useful for other KdV-type equations.