Stability of plane waves on deep water with dissipation Original Research Article

The Benjamin–Feir modulational instability effects the evolution of perturbed plane-wave solutions of the cubic nonlinear Schrödinger equation (NLS), the modified NLS, and the band-modified NLS. Recent work demonstrates that the Benjamin–Feir instability in NLS is “stabilized” when a linear term representing dissipation is added. In this paper, we add a linear term representing dissipation to the modified NLS and band-modified NLS equations and establish that the plane-wave solutions of these equations are linearly stable. Although the plane-wave solutions are stable, some perturbations grow for a finite period of time. We analytically bound this growth and present approximate time-dependent regions of wave-number space that correspond to perturbations that have increasing amplitudes.