Stability of Periodic Traveling Waves for Nonlinear Dispersive Equations

We consider the stability and instability of periodic travling waves for Korteweg-de Vries type equations with fractional dispersion and other nonlinear dispersive equations. We establish that a constrained minimizer for the related variational problem is nonlinearly stable to period preserving perturbations. We also discuss when the associated linearized equation admits exponentially growing solutions. The proof utilizes the variational structure of the equation.