Oscillatory instability of subcritical stationary solutions in the parametrically driven, damped nonlinear Dirac equation

Abstract

The dynamics of the nonlinear Dirac equation (NLDE) under the influence of dissipation and parametric forcing exhibit complex phenomenologies, including soliton destruction and chaotic transitions, which have been extensively observed in numerical simulations. However, a rigorous analytical understanding of the underlying instability mechanisms in the subcritical regime has remained open. In this work, we provide a theoretical answer to these numerical findings by establishing the spectral instability of the fundamental soliton solution. Our methodology relies on a three-step approach linking local asymptotic analyses with global topological arguments. First, we characterize the generalized null space at the critical parameter ($λ_c$), revealing the onset of instability through the splitting of the zero eigenvalue within a parity-dependent subspace. Second, in the non-relativistic limit ($λ\to 0$), we use a Lyapunov--Schmidt reduction to reduce the linearized Dirac's operators into a Pöschl--Teller Schrödinger operator, thereby identifying the instability source as a unique real pair of discrete eigenvalues in the restricted problem. Third, we extend these local results to the entire subcritical domain using a topological continuation argument, which tracks the invariance of the spectral parity in a subset of the complex plane. These analytical results rigorously confirm the instability of the soliton, providing the mathematical mechanism for the wave collapse observed in the driven-damped system.