Existence and spectral instability of bounded spatially periodic traveling waves for scalar viscous balance laws

This paper studies both existence and spectral stability properties of bounded spatially periodic traveling wave solutions to a large class of scalar viscous balance laws in one space dimension with a reaction function of monostable or Fisher-KPP type. Under suitable structural assumptions, it is shown that this class of equations underlies two families of periodic waves. The first family consists of small amplitude waves with finite fundamental period which emerge from a Hopf bifurcation around a critical value of the wave speed. The second family pertains to arbitrarily large period waves which arise from a homoclinic bifurcation and tend to a limiting traveling (homoclinic) pulse when their fundamental period tends to infinity. For both families, it is shown that the Floquet (continuous) spectrum of the linearization around the periodic waves intersects the unstable half plane of complex values with positive real part, a property known as spectral instability. For that purpose, in the case of small-amplitude waves it is proved that the spectrum of the linearized operator around the wave can be approximated by that of a constant coefficient operator around the zero solution and determined by a dispersion relation which intersects the unstable complex half plane. In the case of large period waves, we verify that the family satisfies the assumptions of the seminal result by Gardner (Spectral analysis of long wavelength periodic waves and applications, J. Reine Angew. Math. 491 (1997), 149–181) of convergence of periodic spectra in the infinite-period limit to that of the underlying homoclinic wave, which is unstable. A few examples are discussed.