Benjamin-Feir spectrum of hydroelastic Stokes waves

Abstract

We determine the complete Benjamin-Feir spectrum near the origin for small-amplitude hydroelastic Stokes waves of the two-dimensional finite-depth irrotational Euler equations with surface tension and elastic bending. For the non-resonant Stokes branch and away from an intrinsic characteristic-collision surface $\mathfrak D$, we resolve all four Bloch eigenvalues bifurcating from the origin in the long-wave Floquet regime. Exploiting the Hamiltonian and reversible structure of the problem, we reduce the linearized Bloch operator to the four-dimensional spectral subspace bifurcating from the generalized kernel at the origin and conjugate the resulting matrix to the direct sum of a Benjamin-Feir block and a long-wave block. The long-wave pair remains purely imaginary, whereas the Benjamin-Feir pair is governed by an explicit closed-form instability index $\operatorname{Ind}(\mathtt{h},\kappa,b)$: a positive index produces a local figure-eight spectral curve with nonzero real part, while a negative index implies that all four small eigenvalues remain purely imaginary. Together with the Wilton-type resonance loci and the characteristic-collision surface $\mathfrak D$, this index yields a three-parameter spectral-stability diagram in the depth $\mathtt{h}$, surface tension $\kappa$, and bending rigidity $b$. The diagram recovers the classical pure-gravity critical-depth limit and, on the zero-bending boundary, the gravity--capillary stability diagram. It also reveals a genuinely hydroelastic phenomenon: all Wilton-type resonances disappear whenever $b\geq 1/14$ or $\kappa\geq 1/2$. This provides the first complete rigorous characterization of the local Benjamin-Feir spectrum for a hydroelastic free-boundary problem.