Instability of periodic waves for the Korteweg-de Vries-Burgers equation with monostable source

Abstract: In this paper, it is proved that the KdV-Burgers equation with a monostable source term of Fisher-KPP type has small-amplitude periodic traveling wave solutions with finite fundamental period. These solutions emerge from a subcritical local Hopf bifurcation around a critical value of the wave speed. Moreover, it is shown that these periodic waves are spectrally unstable as solutions to the PDE, that is, the Floquet (continuous) spectrum of the linearization around each periodic wave intersects the unstable half plane of complex values with positive real part. To that end, classical perturbation theory for linear operators is applied in order to prove that the spectrum of the linearized operator around the wave can be approximated by that of a constant coefficient operator around the zero solution, which intersects the unstable complex half plane.