Transverse Instability of Stokes Waves at Finite Depth

Abstract

A Stokes wave is a traveling free-surface periodic water wave that is constant in the direction transverse to the direction of propagation. In 1981 McLean discovered via numerical methods that Stokes waves are unstable with respect to transverse perturbations. In \cite{CreNguStr} for the case of infinite depth we proved rigorously that the spectrum of the water wave system linearized at small Stokes waves, with respect to transverse perturbations, contains unstable eigenvalues lying approximately on an ellipse. In this paper we consider the case of finite depth and prove that the same spectral instability result holds for all but finitely many values of the depth. The computations and some aspects of the theory are considerably more complicated in the finite depth case.