Proof of the transverse instability of Stokes waves

Abstract: A Stokes wave is a traveling free-surface periodic water wave that is constant in the direction transverse to the direction of propagation. In 1981 McLean discovered via numerical methods that Stokes waves at infinite depth are unstable with respect to transverse perturbations of the initial data. Even for a Stokes wave that has very small amplitude $\varepsilon$, we prove rigorously that transverse perturbations, after linearization, will lead to exponential growth in time. To observe this instability, extensive calculations are required all the way up to order $O(\varepsilon^3)$. All previous rigorous results of this type were merely two-dimensional, in the sense that they only treated long-wave perturbations in the longitudinal direction. This is the first rigorous proof of three-dimensional instabilities of Stokes waves.