Transverse stability of periodic traveling waves in Kadomtsev-Petviashvili equations: A numerical study

Abstract: We numerically investigate transverse stability and instability of so-called cnoidal waves, i.e., periodic traveling wave solutions of the Korteweg-de Vries equation, under the time-evolution of the Kadomtsev-Petviashvili equation. In particular, we find that in KP-I small amplitude cnoidal waves are stable (at least for spatially localized perturbations) and only become unstable above a certain threshold. In contrast to that, KP-II is found to be stable for all amplitudes, or, equivalently, wave speeds. This is in accordance with recent analytical results for solitary waves given in \cite{RT1, RT2}.