Stability of $N$-soliton solutions for the modified Camassa--Holm equation

Abstract

In this work, we address the stability of $N$-soliton solutions to the completely integrable modified Camassa--Holm (mCH) equation. Recently, Li, Liu, and Zhu (Math. Ann. 392 (2025), 899--932) established the orbital stability of 2-soliton solutions in $H^4(\mathbb{R})$ with respect to the solution $u$ and highlighted the stability of mCH $N$-soliton solutions remains an urgent challenge. Motivated by their work, we systematically investigate the stability of mCH $N$-solitons. We first employ the bi-Hamiltonian structure of mCH to construct a novel hierarchy of explicit conservation laws with well-defined regularity domains. Then by formulating an appropriate Lyapunov functional, we apply the Inverse Scattering Transform to conduct a rigorous spectral analysis on the recursion operators. Finally, we demonstrate that the mCH $N$-solitons are non-isolated constrained minimizers of a variational problem. Our analysis proves that the $N$-soliton solutions of the mCH equation are both dynamically and orbitally stable in $H^{N+1}(\mathbb{R})$. Notably, when reduced to the 2-soliton case, our framework establishes stability in $H^3(\mathbb{R})$, which improves upon the existing regularity threshold.