Evans functions for periodic waves on infinite cylindrical domains

Using Galerkin approximations, an Evans function for spatially periodic waves on infinite cylindrical domains is constructed. It is also shown that the Evans function can be used to define a parity index for periodic waves that detects whether the wave admits an odd number of real unstable eigenvalues. This parity index depends only on local information for the existence problem of the wave: in particular, it uses information about the linear dispersion relation near zero and the orientability of the unstable and stable manifolds along the nonlinear wave. The results are applied to small-amplitude wave trains for a scalar equation on an infinite strip. (C) 2009 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.