Instabilities of internal gravity waves in the two-dimensional Boussinesq system

Abstract

We consider a two-dimensional, incompressible, inviscid fluid with variable density, subject to the action of gravity. Assuming a stable equilibrium density profile, we adopt the so-called Boussinesq approximation, which neglects density variations in all terms except those involving gravity. This model is widely used in the physical literature to describe internal gravity waves. In this work, we prove a modulational instability result for this system. Specifically, we show that the Floquet operator associated with the linearization around a small-amplitude traveling wave admits at least one eigenvalue with positive real part, bifurcating from a double eigenvalue of the unperturbed linear operator. This can be regarded as the first rigorous justification of the Parametric Subharmonic Instability (PSI) of inviscid internal waves, wherein energy is transferred from an initially excited primary wave to two secondary waves with different frequencies. Our approach uses Floquet-Bloch decomposition and Kato's similarity transformations to compute rigorously the perturbed eigenvalues without requiring boundedness of the perturbed operator - differing fundamentally from prior analyses involving viscosity. Notably, the inviscid setting is especially relevant in oceanographic applications, where viscous effects are often negligible.