Nonlinear stability of vector multi-solitons in coupled NLS and modified KdV equations

Abstract: We prove that the $N$-solitons, including breathers and multi-hump solitons, of the coupled nonlinear Schr\"odinger (CNLS) equations are nonlinearly stable in the Sobolev space $H^{N}$. Moreover, $(N_{1},N_{2})$-solitons of the coupled modified Korteweg--de Vries (CmKdV) equations are shown to be nonlinearly stable in the Sobolev space $H^{2N_{1}+N_{2}}$. The number of negative eigenvalues of the second variation of the Lyapunov functional is $N$ for $N$-solitons of the CNLS equations, and $N_{1}+\lfloor (N_{2}+1)/2 \rfloor$ for $(N_{1},N_{2})$-solitons of the CmKdV equations, which is obtained by exploiting integrable properties. The stability of solitons for the classical NLS and mKdV equations also follows from the same method. In addition, we show that solutions to the linearized spectral problem of the mixed flow equation can be constructed from solutions of the stationary zero curvature equations in a large class of Lie algebras.