Solitary waves and a stability analysis of an equation of short and long dispersive waves

A universal model for the interaction of long nonlinear waves and packets of short waves with long linear carrier waves is given by a system in which an equation of Korteweg-de Vries (KdV) type is coupled to an equation of nonlinear Schrodinger (NLS) type. The system has solutions of steady form in which one component is like a solitary-wave solution of the KdV equation and the other component is like a ground-state solution of the NLS equation. We study the stability of solitary-wave solutions to an equation of short and long waves by using variational methods based on the use of energy-momentum functionals and the techniques of convexity type. We use the concentration compactness method to prove the existence of solitary waves. We prove that the stability of solitary waves is determined by the convexity or concavity of a function of the wave speed. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.