Bogoliubov-de Gennes theory of the snake instability of gray solitons in higher dimensions

Gray solitons are a one-parameter family of solutions to the one-dimensional nonlinear Schrodinger equation (NLSE) with positive cubic nonlinearity, as found in repulsively interacting dilute Bose-Einstein condensates or electromagnetic waves in the visible spectrum in waveguides described by Gross-Pitaevskii mean-field theory. In two dimensions, these solutions to the NLSE appear as a line or plane of depressed condensate density or light intensity, but numerical solutions show that this line is dynamically unstable to "snaking": the initially straight line of density or intensity minimum undulates with exponentially growing amplitude. To assist future studies of quantum mechanical instability beyond mean-field theory, we here pursue an approximate analytical description of the snake instability within Bogoliubov-de Gennes perturbation theory. Within this linear approximation the two-dimensional result applies trivially to three dimensions as well, describing buckling modes of the low-density plane. We extend the analytical results of Kuznetsov and Turitsyn [Soy. Phys. JETP 67, 1583 (1988)] to shorter wavelengths of the snake modulation and show to what extent the snake mode can be described accurately as a parametric instability, in which the position and grayness parameter of the initial soliton simply become dependent on the transverse dimension(s). We find that the parametric picture remains accurate up to second order in the snaking wave number, if the snaking soliton is also dressed by an outward-propagating sound wave, but that beyond second order in the snaking wave number the parametric description breaks down.