Spectral stability in the modified Camassa-Holm equation

Abstract: We investigate the spectral stability of small-amplitude, periodic, traveling-wave solutions of the modified Camassa-Holm equation with cubic nonlinearities. More precisely, we analyze the $L^2(\mr)$-spectrum of the associated linearized operator in a neighborhood of the origin in the spectral plane. Inspired by a recently novel method based on Kato's perturbation theory [Berti et al, Full description of Benjamin-Feir instability of Stokes waves in deep water, \textit{Invent. Math.}, 230 (2022), 651-711.], we provide a complete description of the spectrum near the origin of the linearized operator--an integro-differential operator with periodic coefficients--and thus prove that such waves are not subject to modulational instability. Moreover, a spectral analysis reveals a remarkable threshold phenomenon: such waves with wave number $k^2\leq 3$ exhibit spectral stability, while instability emerges when $k^2>3$.